HD-DVD and the Early Adopter Premium

Hodejo1 writes "The early adopter premium is the difference between the cost of buying the latest greatest techno-toy today and the cost of buying an equal or better unit a couple of years later for much less. That Blu-ray unit you buy today for $300 will cost $80 two years from now. The premium is the $220 you pay to get the starter Blu-ray unit now as opposed to waiting. The same applied for HD-DVD until the axe finally fell and this is where it gets interesting. MP3 Newswire has been tracking post-mortem HD-DVD sales on eBay and surprisingly found that there are many takers. And why are people flocking to buy this decade's Betamax? Simple, they did the math. The demise of HD-DVD format creates "an option where the consumer can get his high-def player NOW without paying the $220 early adopter premium. That savings pays for the player and more. New sealed boxes of the Toshiba HD-A3, which shipped last fall for $300, are now drawing on average about $75 on eBay, where plummeting HD-DVD movie prices are averaging between $6 and $10. "Take a consumer with a 42" plasma set who needs to replace a broken standard definition DVD player. He can a) replace it with another standard definition DVD for about $60. b) He can buy a Blu-Ray player for between $300-$1000. c) He can buy an HD-DVD unit for under $80 and then buy ten $10 or sixteen $6 HD-DVD videos for a total of $180". What really drives this is Blu-ray's skimpy catalog, which will take a couple of years to pump up. Rather than blow the $220 on the early adopter premium just to have access to a limited number of movies the post mortem HD-DVD buyers can enjoy cheap Hi-Def players, cheap Hi-Def videos, and pay less. These users can shift to Blu-ray when players are less expensive and the catalog is robust. Actually, the early adopter premium is more like $320. With the win, Blu-ray manufacturers have raised prices."

Comments

you missed the most important factor.

[kesuki]

aacs has been cracked, while BD+ hasn't so everything on 'hd-dvd' can be backed up to a computer, then sold on e-bay or whatever. you can even burn the backed up hd-dvd to a bd-r, if you're willing to pay $600 for a bd-writer...

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[makomk]

Of course, you can't play the resulting burned BD-R on a standalone BluRay player - as I understand it, they only play AACS-protected pressed BD discs.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[DAldredge]

Doesn't that require a lot of disk space? *looks at the 3 750GB Freeagent Pros that I bought yesterday for 53.99 each* :)

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[kesuki]

well yes, but you only have to store it on hd for 2 years. since then, burners for BD media will be cheap... i can't remember if hd-dvd does dual layer, so it's like 15-30 gb per movie. as for not playing it on standalone players, you can still play it back on a 'cheap' pc player with a bd-rom bd rom drives are still spendy too, they will be cheaper in 2 years though.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[Zocalo]

I'm pretty sure that can't be right. I could perhaps understand the control freaks at Sony trying to pull a stunt like that, but requiring AACS is going to have a big impact on another emerging market Sony has a huge stake in; HD camcorders. Currently, the only way of efficiently distributing sizeable hi-res content from such a camcorder to friends and family (assuming they have HDTV capability in the first place) is via a physical HD disc, which essentially now means Blu-Ray. Hitachi even has a HD camcorder available that records straight to an 8cm Blu-Ray disc, which is then supposed to be immediately playable in any Blu-Ray player. Unless both the Hitachi camcorder and end-user AV software is also doing AACS encoding before writing content to disc, then that's going to leave a lot of HD camcorder owners just a little peeved when they try and show of their latest home videos in glorious HD.

Then again, it could actually be a good thing if they don't play on standalone players. It was bad enough having to sit through $random_family_member's holiday snaps, things took a turn for the worse with the first analogue camcorders, but the thought of seeing all that in HD? Won't somebody please think of the children!

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[mrdjames]

Why does the PS3 always get left out of this discussion? It's basically a blue ray player packed in a media center. Who cares if you can't play games with it, you can a lot more than just play movies with it.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[camperdave]

Are you saying that there is no such thing as a "cleartext" BluRay disk, that I won't be able to burn my home movies?

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've seen on the subject, that seems to be the case. Yet another reason why the studios went with Blu-ray - it locks the independent producers out and helps them keep their stranglehold.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you missed the most important factor -- the majority of people who buy consumer electronics are not nerds.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[dnoyeb]

As i understand it, encrypted DVDs will only play with HDMI but unencrypted ones will play in hi-def. Since most pr0n is not encrypted, those Blue-Ray players would take a beating.

I am looking for an HD-DVD myself simply as an upscaling standard DVD player. They are cheaper than the regular upscaling DVD players on average.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[Guppy06]

"can be backed up to a computer"

That only interests a small segment of the audiophile population, which is itself a small segment of the consumer population in general. If that truly was a major deciding factor in the purchase, then the MPAA's piracy numbers are accurate. You can't have it both ways.

Of course, I'd wager you also foresaw the failure of Apple's iTunes because of its DRM format and still wonder how the Virtual Console can possibly make money with ZSNES available for free.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[H8X55]

where did you scoop those up for $53.99 each?

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 2 kinds of Blu-ray discs, recordable and pressed. AACS is mandatory for pressed discs, but not for recordable discs. Recordable discs are half capacity of pressed discs, so (say) an independent filmmaker who doesn't want to shell out $20,000 for an AACS key is SOL. I'm not sure if the recordable discs are lesser quality than pressed discs in other ways too.

The (potential) problems:

1. NetFlix won't ship recordable DVD media, only pressed DVD media. They do so because pressed DVDs are much less brittle than recordable DVDs. I don't know whether recordable Blu-rays are more brittle than pressed Blu-rays, or if NetFlix will decide to carry recordable Blu-rays. I'd guess not based on their DVD decisions, so indy filmmakers, SOL.

2. I don't know if the recordable Blu-Rays use the same file system/feature set as pressed Blu-Rays. Can recordable Blu-Rays support picture-in-picture, for instance? I don't know the answer to this, but it's not hard to imagine Sony limiting its competitor's features.

When Blu-Ray won the format war, the big studios have essentially locked out smaller players from the hi-def home entertainment market. Oh well.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[gEvil (beta)]

Some Best Buys have them on clearance. Just got back from mine, but they're still at $239 each. : (

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[timmarhy]

"MPAA's piracy numbers are accurate"

please put the crack pipe down, it's already been established that backing up movies you've purchased is legal.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[Blazie]

BD+ was cracked late last year by Slysoft. Engadget story

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[MikeBabcock]

Of course you can. The amount of FUD surrounding Blu-Ray is phenomenal. The BD players I know of play DVDs, encrypted or otherwise, BD movies, encrypted or otherwise and even some other file types in some cases.

My Playstation 3 quite happily plays high definition content over my network using its DLNA (UPnP) functionality which for all it knows could be ripped HD-DVD discs.

Speaking of FUD and Sony, the PS3 quite happily rips CDs to its hard drive and then lets you copy them off to memory sticks, etc. if you want. They've also demonstrated a feature whereby a BD movie can be ripped to be played on your PSP on the go (although not without DRM of some kind obviously).

See also Sony vs. Microsoft round 1.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[kakalaky]

While I can't speak for other bd players my PS3 has no problem playing discs without encryption.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[jhoegl]

Thus the reason the industry is adopting Blu-Ray. Good job on being suckered into the VHS of players.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[DAldredge]

Best Buy. Look on slickdeals.net http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=0&t=764683

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[Doggabone]

I spot upscaling DVD players for 50 bucks or so quite often in Ontario, I bet prices are near wherever you are (although maybe you're looking for features that these don't have). But here at least, I don't see HD-DVD players selling that cheaply in retail.

Yet!

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[scotch]

That only interests a small segment of the audiophile population, which is itself a small segment of the consumer population in general.

... which is only a small segment of all of humanity, which is only a small segment of the Animal kingdom, which is only a small segment of living things, which is only a small segment of baryonic matter, which is only a small segment of all matter.

Why stop, you were doing so well.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[DrXym]

BD-9/4.7 discs, i.e. DVDs containing Blu Ray structure can be burnt and played on a PS3 and probably other players. It would be possible right now to transcode movies from download or HD DVD and stick them on BD for cheap. Obviously the content might be non-optimal but it's the cheapest option right now.

I have no idea what the story is with physical BDs, but I imagine that if AACS is required (which I doubt), that it would be seamlessly done by the burning software.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[makomk]

"My Playstation 3 quite happily plays high definition content over my network using its DLNA (UPnP) functionality which for all it knows could be ripped HD-DVD discs."

Of course it does, because it's not playing it from a BluRay disc, and therefore not subject to whatever silly rules the BluRay consortium decide to set..

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[Gr8Apes]

I believe you are wrong. I believe all stand alone BD players require RomMark, which is only available with special hardware that you have to be licensed for (ie, not the home consumer).

BD will die. The reason why is DVD is good enough for the masses, and downloads will be more convenient/cost-effective for the majority that own HD equipment, leaving only a tiny slice of the pie for the overpriced BD media.

Oh, and as predicted, BD prices rose. Expect BD Live (2.0 profile) players to debut at $600 and stay above $500 for 2 years.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[iainl]

$50 upscaling is, in my experience, so poor that you're better off letting the panel's internal scaling do the job instead - I set my cheap HDMI player to output 480p because it looks better.

Toshiba's scaling in these HD-DVD players is massively superior, and definitely worth the small premium even without any HD-DVD discs to hand.

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[Jeruvy]

I think the GP is right on the money with this. I too bought my HD last December for $200 (went on sale) then in January I got $80 back, since the item was price protected. So it only cost me $120. I got 2 movies with it (compared to 0 with my BD) and 5 more a month and a half later due to a promotion. So 7 movies and a player all for $120 I couldn't buy those movies for that last December. Now, I'm looking for content and deciding between paying $30+ for BD or $10-20 for HD. Not much guessing here.

Oh, and the quality difference between BD and HD? None. It's all in the content and most are poor re-masters, so I'd say don't bother updating your DVD catalog since your HD/BD will upconvert most of your SD content fine enough (compared to the HD remasters). Some newer content is actually done in HD and will greatly benefit from the new format, but don't think that much of the current offering (especially movies done before HD filming was available) will greatly benefit your viewing pleasure to justify the expense of buying it again.

Plus they are useful DVD players

[mccalli]

Another difference from Betamax is that an HD-DVD player can play today's most popular format without trouble - the DVD. It can also act as an upscaling DVD player, so in fact you'll get better quality than a standard DVD player.

There was a Digg link where everyone laughed at play.com rebranding an HD-DVD player as an Upscaling DVD Player with HD Capabilities. I disagree with the laugh track - I think that's a clever step to take, and it's also completely true.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[olddoc]

Are they really useful? I thought I read that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray take over a minute to boot up and play.
That would get annoying.

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[ArikTheRed]

It is... oh god it is. I got a BR player, and it takes forever to boot. Not only that, some discs actually take forever to load beyond the boot-up time. Ratatouille actually took over 5 minutes to load when we tried to watch it... just sat there with a loading screen with a damn rat on it. I swear - it was laughing at me.

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[Vukovar]

True enough. I had purchased an upconvert after getting a plasma TV and the picture was still terrible; the HD-DVD player made an excellent upconvert for regular DVDs to that TV and I couldn't be happier. No, it doesn't boot as fast, but I'll put up with that in turn for an excellent picture on the TV at a fraction of the cost (2nd gen Toshiba HD-DVD players boot faster than the first gen).

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[dangitman]

Well, my PS3 boots in 20 seconds or less, and Blu-Rays play as soon as the disc has spun up and mounted - maybe 10 seconds.

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[WidescreenFreak]

So what? I'm so fed up with people complaining about this. We're so damned spoiled with this "instant gratification" society.

If you're about to sit and watch a two-hour movie, then WTF is the big deal about having to wait a whole, additional minute for the unit to get ready? Turn it on, go and get a beer out of the refrigerator, then come back. If you're so worried about having to wait 1 minute to watch a 120 minute movie, then I would have to argue that the problem lies not with the player but with the impatience of the watcher.

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[Squozen]

Ouch. That's a night-and-day difference from the PS3.

The manufacturers swear the standalones will be 'nearly as fast' as a PS3 later this year. Doesn't really help the early adopters though.

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[Enahs]

My A3 takes nearly 30 seconds to boot. Fairly annoying, but I've had decent DVD players that took nearly that long.

And yes, it's useful. 30 seconds to boot vs. 2 hours to watch a movie on average; you do the math. Turn the player on, grab something to drink, then take a movie off the shelf. By then, the thing's on and you're ready to sit down and feel your ass grow.

Regular DVDs look fantastic on it, yes. I would recommend that people not turn on the black and rgb enhancement, though; those features seem to boost ringing artifacts.

Just got Spartacus and 2001 on HD DVD for my birthday. They look and sound unbelievably fantastic.

I know it's the only choice for the future, but don't believe the Blu-Ray hype. Yes, it'll have greater storage capacity; no, it's not that big of a deal. There are only so many bits required to do good 1080p h.264. I know people are acting like, oh wow, look, now that HD DVD is dead, Blu-Ray players will be cheaper and movies will look even better! From what I've seen and been hearing, that's not even close to happening yet.

This WILL bite studios and manufacturers in the ass, mark my words, unless they act quickly and decisively (which means taking a loss.) Doesn't help, either, that Disney's latest catalog "from the vault" release, 101 Dalmatians, is being pushed as a DVD release. All I'm seeing pushed as Blu-Ray releases in mass media are the movies most people would rent, rather than own, anyway. Right now, it's smelling like a massive failtrain, and unless things give in the future, we'll be doomed to a few more years of movies released in 480p.

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[zippthorne]

Why does a media player need to "boot" up, anyway?

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we've been spoilt by DVDs and VHSs. My DVD player takes about 10-15 seconds to boot (15 being the time it takes to read XviD files, something I consider a "bonus" feature and am willing to allow more leeway) - and VHSs took under 10 seconds to engage. If technology's going forward, shouldn't things be getting FASTER? For anyone who's upset, I'm betting that it's because they're noticing a negative trend - if we accept a minute boot up time, how long will it be before we're waiting 5 minutes for SuperHDdisc++ to load?

Having said that, the early adopters should have known what they were in for. Given that they weren't willing to wait 12 months, they should at least wait 1.2 minutes ;)

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[Gr8Apes]

The Toshiba A3 takes about 30s to boot up (it is a full-fledged linux system under the hood, after all). Popping a disk in takes another 10s or so.

boy is this getting old...

[YesIAmAScript]

Article says BluRay manufacturers have raised prices. This is not true. The link tracks average sale price, no manufacturer's recommended price.

Yes, average sale price has gone up after Christmas sales ended.

Also, if BluRay's catalog is skimpy, what does that make the HD-DVD catalog, which is smaller?

It'd be great if the HD-DVD fans took a clue from Toshiba and stopped trying to push a dead format. They're not doing anyone any favors.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Berkyjay]

This article is dead on and people are smart for doing this. Don't hate because someone knows a good thing when they see it. I just bought 10 HD DVD's for $50. And at a later point I will rip them onto my computer then burn them to a Blu-Ray disc.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[vertinox]

It'd be great if the HD-DVD fans took a clue from Toshiba and stopped trying to push a dead format. They're not doing anyone any favors.

To be fair, I suspect Blu-Ray won't outlive plain old DVD. Unless Sony starts dumping $20 Blu-ray players with $9.99 movies, the rest of the world who can't afford Hi-Def TVs and Sound systems will probaly be satisfied with plain old DVDs for quite sometime.

Once the initial analog hurtle was jumped from VHS to DVD, there was no real need to go beyond that except those who had Hi-Def. Much like SCDs and mini-discs never took off, I personally believe Blu-Ray will be "good enough" until downloads, holographic discs, or solid state media takes off in 5 years. I still bet DVD will still outlast them for quite some time.

Just think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as the Laser Discs of the 21st century rather than VHS or Betamax. They're nice, but most people don't need them or will buy them except hardcore hi-def enthusiasts.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[slazzy]

I totally agree with you on every point... For me, DVD quality is more than good enough, and I couldn't imagine the point of upgrading to Blu-ray or HD-DVD. maybe my eye sight isn't that good anymore, but I just can't even see the difference. I would pay to upgrade when the media gets significantly smaller so that it can be used in portable devices - I would see the point of that.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Adambomb]

Just think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as the Laser Discs of the 21st century rather than VHS or Betamax. They're nice, but most people don't need them or will buy them except hardcore hi-def enthusiasts. Exactly!

This is the part that most people seem to be missing about all this. High Def video is currently a pretty high end luxury item to most people when one considers the cost of the TV itself, sound, players, and then media. Unless high def becomes standard amongst the wider audience, this does not mean a whole heck of a lot to those that arent videophiles/audiophiles in a big way AND have the funds (or perhaps stupid with lots of funds or obsessive with lots of funds, either way needs a good chunk of income to expend on non-essentials).

The one upside....BD-Rs will have some pretty big data capacity.....but just like you're saying so do USB keychains and slim external drives NOW, let alone solid state 5 years from now. Improvements to broadband penetration, wireless, and NEW storage techs will more likely be a coffin nail wayy more than 5 years in the future imo however (and now that I've said that, i hope the universe shows me to be incredibly wrong....realism is getting really depressing in this day and age).

Re:boy is this getting old...

[maxume]

Are you going to watch them, or was the idea to save $100 that you wouldn't have otherwise spent?

Re:boy is this getting old...

[armada]

The story is true and has a good point about early adoption and the value of the now defunct HDDVD. That said, it is not taking into consideration the fact that in 2 to 4 years phisical media delivery will likely be passee alltogether. BlueRay (Disclosure, I liked BlueRay more than HDDVD) will have a short lived victory now that Apple has broken into the download rental market. Once Apple takes the risks and gets a good working modle up (a la itunes store) then others will follow with more competitive pricing and featurs. Before I get flammed I know Apple was far from the first but they will push the envelope and stimulate adoption as they did with USB, i-pod, i-tunes distro model and now the i-phone. Love or hate that company you have to admit that once they adopt or invent a technology they seem to have a way of making it flourish.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[CopaceticOpus]

I just took a look at Best Buy's website. As a sample, I looked at their 30-39" TVs. Of the 24 they had for sale, 23 had at least 720p resolution. Over time TVs get replaced, so more and more TVs in people's homes will be HD capable.

Sports are being broadcast more often in HD, over the air and via cable. Sports have the benefit of looking much better and more detailed in HD. It's a difference almost anyone will see. This will drive the sale of HD TVs and general HD awareness. Once people do have HD TVs, they're going to want the higher quality movies, just to show off their TVs if nothing else.

Within 2-3 years, the price of BR players is going to plummet. Prices are high currently because of the cost of manufacturing, and because the manufacturers want to take in the big bucks from enthusiasts before they allow prices to drop.

The Laser Disc comparison is interesting. Blu Ray has the advantage of not being giant and cumbersome, and not needing to be flipped over every 30-60 minutes. If Blu Ray has a similar flaw, it is in its copy protection. If there is a high incidence of discs that won't play and players that become worthless, it might kill the format, but that seems unlikely.

Blu Ray is easily rentable, from Netflix and Blockbuster. This will ease adoption, and is the main reason I'm personally planning to get a Blu Ray player.

Digital movie downloads are the future, but that's at least 10 years from becoming mainstream. In the meantime there will be a few billion Blu Ray discs sold.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[evilviper]

the rest of the world who can't afford Hi-Def TVs and Sound systems will probaly be satisfied with plain old DVDs for quite sometime.

By that metric, VCDs should outlive both DVDs as well as Blu-ray...

Unfortunately, the reality of economies of scale isn't so nice and simple. If you've bought a pack of CD-Rs lately, you might notice that prices are going up significantly, even while DVD+-Rs are falling. They're not equivalently priced yet, but for the storage, a DVD is much, much cheaper.

VCDs used to be FAR cheaper than DVDs for the same reason... Now, both the players and the movies/discs are only about half the price of a much higher quality DVD. Pretty much everywhere in the world that VCDs were popular, DVD sales is rising as well, faster than VCD sales. At some point, the cost of making DVD players and discs will get as cheap as CDs/VCDs, and then the rest of the world that currently "can't afford" "plain old DVDs" won't be able to afford NOT to switch...

Exactly the same thing will eventually be true of Blu-ray. Smaller CRT HDTVs in the US are down to $300, less than 2X the price of similar sized standard definition TVs. It won't be long before they're just as cheap, and those who "can't afford" them now, will be able to get a practically free upgrade to high-def. And it probably won't be too long thereafter that Blu-ray discs get nearly as cheap as DVDs, and anyone around the world can pick them up for less than a DVD, and get higher quality for free.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[badasscat]

This article is dead on and people are smart for doing this. Don't hate because someone knows a good thing when they see it. I just bought 10 HD DVD's for $50. And at a later point I will rip them onto my computer then burn them to a Blu-Ray disc.

And play them on what? They won't play on any BD player currently in existence, or likely in existence in the future (by design).

Then there's the media. How cheap are you expecting dual-layer Blu-Ray discs to be? Go look up the price of a dual-layer recordable DVD. And those have been out for five years or so. Right now, single layer Blu-Ray recordable discs are about $10 each. They'll come down eventually, but it will take a while, as it did with DVD.

In the end, you'll probably have spent about $15 total per burned Blu-Ray disc - which by that time will be more than you could have bought the real thing for used. (On a lot of Blu-Ray titles, it's *already* more than you'd pay for them, in some cases new.) I guarantee you 100%, without any doubt in my mind, that you're going to end up re-buying all these movies rather than burning them and watching them on a Blu-Ray player.

HD-DVD proponents really need to just let this whole thing go. What makes sense at this point is to either stick with DVD, which is fine, or buy a Blu-Ray player. It does not make sense to buy an HD-DVD player at any price. It is a dead format with a tiny library that's not going to get any bigger. Sure, the players can upscale DVD's, but so can pretty much every regular $40 DVD player these days. HD-DVD isn't even worth that $35 premium to play the few good HD-DVD titles that exist, especially when you factor in having to re-buy them for Blu-Ray (unless you see a need to keep two players hooked up, one of which will be for no other reason than to play the few HD-DVD's you actually own).

Save that $35 for buying your first couple Blu-Ray movies or paying for a couple months of Netflix.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[spirit of reason]

Too bad it won't fix the awful camera angle used to broadcast football. There's so much more to football than the guy with the ball or the line of scrimmage.

In addition to sports, computer animation should look better in a higher resolution. Beyond those two, though, I don't think there's much purpose in HD.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[westlake]

most people don't need them or will buy them except hardcore hi-def enthusiasts.

The fundamental difference between then and now is that the HD buyer begins with a substantial investment in HD video and multichannel digital audio.

He has practical large screen - wide screen - home projection. He has his choice of display technologies.

He can spend as much or as little as he chooses on theater sound.

If he choses the upscale HT receiver, HD radio, satelite radio, Internet radio, PC and iPod integration are likely to be part of the standard package.

The complete digital environment for home entertainment.

He has his choice of three video game consoles, none of which pump out less than 480p video. It's likely his HDTV can accept PC inputs directly and do its own upscaling of DVD video.

There is no intelligible reason to think why he shouldn't be upgrading to the mass market Profile 2 Blu-Ray player when it becomes available.

He won't be paying a premium for the Blu-Ray rental of 10,000 BC from Netflix. He won't need the Blu Ray drive or PS3 to access online content.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Berkyjay]

Oh no, I am watching them. I have the Xbox HD DVD player. I figure Microsoft will come out with a Blu-Ray drive at some point in the future.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Berkyjay]

Not really worrying about it. It will be at least a year before I buy a Blu-Ray player SO I will enjoy the movies I bought on HD DVD and I will most likely keep my HD DVD player in my system. I'll switch to Blu-Ray when I'm damn good and ready.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Berkyjay]

I own a 42 inch Samsung DLP and I notice a pretty big difference between DVD and Hi-Def movies.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[GreatDrok]

Vertinox said "Just think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as the Laser Discs of the 21st century rather than VHS or Betamax. They're nice, but most people don't need them or will buy them except hardcore hi-def enthusiasts."

I think the difference today is home cinema/theater is much more practical. Back when I got into this I had found I was buying various movies in widescreen on VHS (1990 or so) because it was great to see the whole picture. However, VHS just couldn't hold enough detail to allow for widescreen presentation, especially when I got a 16:9 TV in 1992. (OK, so I'm a classic early adopter.) Anyway, at about this time multistandard LaserDisc players were becoming available so the pathetic PAL LD library could be supplemented by the 10,000+ titles available on LD from the US. Picture quality of LD was vastly better than VHS. The basic luma resolution was 400+ lines compared with barely 240 lines for VHS but it was the chroma where LD really shined. Compared to a VHS tape where colour was muddy, a LD looked rich and crisp. This meant that LD was a viable format for widescreen and projection. Also, many films were available in widescreen with extras etc on LD so for movie enthusiasts the LD was it. LD pretty much launched home cinema as a mainstream possibility. Sure, there were collectors with 16 and 35mm projection systems at home and boy did I envy them but it wasn't practical, LD was.

I lived with a standard CRT widescreen set until the mid 90's and built up a decent collection of movies and kept looking at projection. The big Barco CRT projectors were horrendously expensive and needed expensive video processors to improve the quality of standard definition material enough that you wouldn't see the scanlines. Fortunately at this time, DLP appeared and I was able to buy a projector that lacked scanlines although it didn't have the same black level capability but it was a worthwhile tradeoff. Around that time DVD was released. Resolution was slightly better than LD but the real killer was that the discs were much smaller and cheaper so it was natural to buy a player. Side by side there wasn't enough of a difference to warrant replacing all my LDs with DVDs and I have continued to use the LD player.

Then along came HD. Finally, the combination of digital projection, surround sound and high definition discs resulted in the ability to perfectly replicate the cinema experience at a budget. Sure, most people think the discs and players are the expensive part but when you think that fifteen years ago a good home cinema set up was going to cost you well north of $100,000 and today you can far outstrip that with an HD DVD or BD player and a DLP projector you can see that things have really improved. Heck, you can get better quality that most cinemas for under $2000 these days. HD DLP projectors are under $1000, HD DVD player, nice amp and speakers, easily under a grand and awesome quality. Get a BD player later and you're set to avoid the sticky carpets and overpriced drinks of the local cinema.

I don't consider LD a failure, it was part of the evolution. Certainly I can't equate LD with HD DVD or BD since LD as a format survived for over 20 years and had a vast catalogue.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[StarkRG]

Smaller? Smaller devices need LESS resolution, not more. If you really can't tell the difference between a 27in 420i SDTV and a 42in 1080p HDTV then yeah, you need new glasses. Think of it like looking through a standard glass window vs. looking through a frosted glass window. During the Oscars my brother was commenting on how you could see people's veins, I guessed that this was because the stage lights were so bright the usable light penetrated into the skin more. I think makeup people haven't adapted to the intricacies that HDTV can show. (You can see even a single stray hair that's fallen across someone's face, or each individual bubble and leaf in a scene with a babbling brook)

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Miamicanes]

> What makes sense at this point is to either stick with DVD, which is fine, or buy a Blu-Ray player.
> It does not make sense to buy an HD-DVD player at any price.

You're assuming that many people buying HD-DVD players TODAY are primarily motivated by desire to watch NEW movies in HD, as opposed to picking up a cool new disposable toy because it was cheap enough to say 'Fuck it' and buy just to enjoy the novelty of, and have a future player for HD camcorder videos burned to DVD+R media.

The fact that Blockbuster still has HD-DVDs available to rent helps. As long as they don't try to pull a Netflix and pre-emptively convert my queue to regular DVD on the perverse assumption that I care more about the movie itself than the fact that it's HD, I'll remain a Blockbuster subscriber. The moment I find a non-HD DVD from Blockbuster in the mailbox, and no option for my queue that says, "Delete queued movies no longer available on HD-DVD (or at least move them to the very end, and don't even THINK about sending one unless there's absolutely nothing else in my queue that's available on HD-DVD)", I'll do what I did before -- set the HD-DVR to record anything that looks interesting on a HD premium movie channel, and keep it around until I feel like watching it.

Furthermore, it'll be a cold, snowy July day in downtown Miami before I voluntarily spend more than a pittance on anything touched by the tentacles of Sony -- a company so thoroughly evil, they make the DVD Forum look saintly and benevolent by comparison.

---

"One down, Blu to go..."

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Orestesx]

I think his point was that with a high-density disc you could store a standard-def movie in a portable form factor. I don't think this will happen though. It's already been tried, and failed as a movie format (UMD)

Re:boy is this getting old...

[slaingod]

Yea, Burnable Media will be going out of business a year from now. DVD+R media is the only one BARELY still better than just buying a hard disk and leaving it on there. Once 1TB drives hit $100, then it is cheaper just to buy new hard drives than to 1) Buy a burner, 2) Buy the media, 3) Store the media, 4) Plus the actual time/effort involved in burning as opposed to just leaving an ISO or VIDEO_TS folder on the drive. At $100 per 1TB, the cost of storing a DVD is ~ $0.45, which is about the cost of media per disc if you are getting at least Ritek quality.

Harddrive manufacturers (and then in 3-5 years, flash manufacturers) are going to get a serious boost in volume within the year I would say, and media vendors are going to start consolidating and going out of business. Then in 3-5 years, when you can get a 20GB flash stick for $2, I can see it happening again. Whereas HD need to overtake media in price, I don't think flash will, as there are other advantages to using the sticks that they could cost say twice as much to store 20GB and still be useful.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oddly enough, the price of "new" regular DVD's has mysteriously jumped to around the same price as new Blu-Ray discs. Competition(?) or a class action suit in the making? Hmmm....

Re:boy is this getting old...

[elhedran]

This article is dead on and people are smart for doing this. Don't hate because someone knows a good thing when they see it. I just bought 10 HD DVD's for $50. And at a later point I will rip them onto my computer then burn them to a Blu-Ray disc.

And play them on what? They won't play on any BD player currently in existence, or likely in existence in the future (by design).

Um, my perfectly good $59 HD-DVD player.

Then there's the media. How cheap are you expecting dual-layer Blu-Ray discs to be? Go look up the price of a dual-layer recordable DVD. And those have been out for five years or so. Right now, single layer Blu-Ray recordable discs are about $10 each. They'll come down eventually, but it will take a while, as it did with DVD.

Yes, I can wait. I remember DVD, or rather I remember paying the premium to get into DVD early. This time I'm into high-definition earlyish, but for a mere fraction of the cost. I bought a few classics at a pittance. What are DVD media going for these days? $1? thats when I'll burn them over. As long as my HD-DVD player doesn't explode before then (and my DVD player made it that long just fine, no reason the new tech wont) I'm in HD land cheap.

HD-DVD proponents really need to just let this whole thing go.

I'm not a HD-DVD proponent. I'm a cheap Hi Def movie proponent. HD-DVD in many cases is less than the cost of DVD at the moment. For instance I'm getting Heroes season one at a fraction of what I've seen the DVD version go for. So I can either trust the laser that works now will work in five or ten years, and get really cheap HD now, or I can wait for BR to finish coming in and switch then. I'll have cheap HD now, not Cheap HD in a few years time.

When I will switch to BluRay is when there are more BluRay titles at my local video store than DVDs.

The main thing the parent needs to get here is this isn't about pushing the HD-DVD format. Its about accepting that BluRay won, and getting stuff as cheaply as possible now. That space for my HD-DVD player isn't costing me anything in rent. Nor have I leased the HD-DVD titles. And they don't have a built in self-destruct.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Lewrker]

It'd be great if the HD-DVD fans took a clue from Toshiba and stopped trying to push a dead format. They're not doing anyone any favors. Sony thanks you for participating in its "Competition is bad for us AND you" campaign. We will collect your soul at a later date.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

And play them on what? They won't play on any BD player currently in existence, or likely in existence in the future (by design). They will play JUST FINE if they are re-authored -- i.e. the file formats are changed to that of BD (most of the data won't need to be resampled, just reorganized). And even if it won't play - if he's ripped it to his PC, he play it on his PC, TODAY.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[wvmarle]

HD is all interesting and so, but for me it's a no-go. I've got myself a nice 25"SD TV, and I'm not going to replace it anytime soon - those new-fashioned wide-screen TV's are just horrible to watch normal TV as everything gets stretched out, and 25" is a big enough piece of furniture in my living room. I simply don't have a 42' piece of wall available.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[dangitman]

Um, my perfectly good $59 HD-DVD player.

How the hell are you going to play a burned Blu-Ray disc on an HD-DVD player?

Re:boy is this getting old...

[DrXym]

To be fair, I suspect Blu-Ray won't outlive plain old DVD. Unless Sony starts dumping $20 Blu-ray players with $9.99 movies, the rest of the world who can't afford Hi-Def TVs and Sound systems will probaly be satisfied with plain old DVDs for quite sometime.

You are wrong. Just go into an TV store and 90% of the sets will be HD ready. Some stores have gotten rid of CRT TVs entirely. Okay so there might be a few budget sets which are SD, but the kinds of people (cheapskates) who buy them are hardly relevant to a new format's success. The market as a whole is emphatically going HD.

If people can only buy HD sets, they are going to want HD content. It is inevitable that as people go HD and as the price of Blu Ray players drop that people will buy into the format. In fact its a no brainer since a Blu Ray player is backwards compatible. There is no downside to buying a player.

Anyway the prices do have a way to go. DVD was just as expensive in its day - my first player cost £550! The prices for hardware and software will drop over time just like they did for DVD.

As for downloads, I can't see them taking off until everyone has zero configuration, unlimited download, high speed broadband. If you think HD TVs are a barrier for entry, just consider what downloads entail. I do think downloads are attractive for rentals but I question the sanity of anyone who builds a collection of movies / shows purchased from Amazon, Apple, Sony, MS etc. Who the hell wants to pay near full price for a low quality (compared to physical media) digital collection which is locked to play on a handful of devices? If there were an industry wide DRM layer and standards for interoperability, or passive copy protection like watermarking then it might stand a chance. At the moment its degrading into the same hellscape of competing factions that destroyed ebooks from taking off.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[NevermindPhreak]

It'll take a lot more than a year for that to happen. Eventually, yeah, but in the meantime I'm currently in the process of burning a lot of friends CDs because mine were destroyed. A 20GB flash stick may be $2 in 3-5 years, but i bought my last 50-pack of DVD-R's for $4.99, and that holds 235GB. And I don't mind giving a friend a burned DVD, whereas I would want my flash drive back.

I expect us to reach a point where everyone has their phone, music player, and file storage in one device, before recordable media starts dying. This is just starting to become more common, but is still inconvenient for most people.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[slaingod]

That's some very cheap media, lol. I mean, even for cheap media, that is cheap. :) I don't really do -R, so I was just going by the AllMediaOutlet price of 30cents per Ritek DVD+R disk basically. Then another 10 cents per disk to put it into a 500 disk wallet album, etc. Obviously there is the time cost of me getting up and switching the disks as well, using the sharpie, and dealing with the inevitable bad disks. That's how I calculated my costs. Any way you slice it, pretty soon it will be cheaper to just leave it on hard drives, and save the 20 minutes per disk (I always verify my burns).

Also, keep in mind that more and more, people are getting 720p BluRay rips that are 8.5GB, and Dual Layer media is easily $1.30 per at least from my usual sources.

Of course you then have to deal with all the drives, but a 1TB drive takes up a lot less space than 250 dvd's. And there are those new docking stations:
http://www.geekstuff4u.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=&products_id=630

And I agree that flash drives will have a price disadvantage for a number of years, but I think the convenience, size factor, power issues (no need to spin a disk, or need to take up that space in a laptop, etc.) will quickly push the market in that direction. And your friend can always just copy the movie off the flash drive onto a cheaper harddisk.

Won't happen overnight, but seems inevitable to me.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[MtViewGuy]

Actually, I expect Blu-ray player prices to start dropping because by this summer, we'll be seeing players that implement vastly less expensive, more integrated player chipsets with full Profile 1.1 and 2.0 compliance that will be physically a lot smaller than current players. After all, the physical size of current production stand-alone DVD players are vastly smaller than earlier design machines, thanks to modern DVD player chipsets.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[Anonymous Coward]

He is delusional and doesn't know where he is going with this argument.

Re:boy is this getting old...

[elhedran]

The comment starting with 'um' refers to the fact that even ten years from now, my $59 HD-DVD player will still play my $10 HD-DVD movies. I think you would have to be either intentionally misreading the comment, or a pretty dim to think I meant I'd take working HD-DVD disks, rip them to bluray, then try and play burned bluray disks on the HD-DVD player when I still, by definition, have working HD-DVD discs.

I suppose you could assume I'd have just had them ripped the whole time and no longer have the HD-DVD discs, but then why burn them at all, I'd just play them via Myth off a data disc (hdd, or whatever burnable media is at the time).

Re:boy is this getting old...

[afedaken]

normal TV as everything gets stretched out,

Looks like somebody couldn't find the aspect ratio button.

I can't even begin to count how many times I've gone on site for a job, and seen people stretching 4:3 images on a 16:9 screen.

Great Player

[n9uxu8]

The Toshibas are excellent upconverting players...I need another dvd for the basement HDTV, so I plan on picking up another rather than shelling out for a standard upconverting player.

Dave

Re:Great Player

[doofusclam]

Is there any work being done on hacking these things? As they run Linux and have decent video decode capability it would be a bit of a steal.

Re:Great Player

[MagicNegro]

I'm not feeling too bad about my purchase of a Toshiba HD DVD. I mean, it came almost free with the HDTV that we bought before Christmas, and aside from renting a few HD DVDS, we haven't really invested a whole lot of money.

It came with 2 movies "Bourne Identity" (love it, great action and good features) and "300" (artist self gratification and generally crap movie), and a coupon for 5 more free. Haven't seen them yet. Doubt I will. It won't matter.

We will be buying a Blu-Ray once the price point on a medium featured unit goes sub-$200. Typical consumer price.

Re:Great Player

[n9uxu8]

Yikes...well, I bought my TVs on sale and the same with the player, so I didn't spend too much. I don't have a star trek-themed amphitheater, I have a living room and a basement decked out with my home-gym, electronics workbench, bike workshop and hdtv/player/recliners. I don't buy what I won't use (well...with the exception of a few RTS games I bought before finally deciding, I hate RTS games). So, I get quite a bit of use from them. Uverse has enough HD channels that when I do watch TV, I'm almost always on an HD channel, and even though UVerse HD doesn't look as good as others, it is noticeably better than SD.

Dave

Re:Great Player

[DWIM]

Bought my Toshiba HD DVD last Black Friday. Sent in the coupon for the 5 free movies. They arrived two days ago. I expect you'll get them.

Re:Great Player

[Enahs]

Same here. Freak electrical storm took out my TV and DVD/VCR combo, decided I wasn't getting another SDTV, so after spending several hundred dollars on an LCD TV, a little over $150 for a high-def DVD player with 7 movies seemed like a no-brainer. Most the fanboys on teh Intarweb are determined that we need to feel stupid for spending that amount on a player that "won't do real high-def" instead of spending $500+ on a Profile 1.0 BD player, but I think I know who's stupid in this situation. And while I wait for BD to come down to mortal status, I'm using my player as a DVD player (good upscaler in good upscaler price range? you betcha) and grabbing a few titles that are unlikely to be on BD for a while. I might even get an XBox drive so that I can...you know...back my movies up.

Also glad to hear I'm not the only person out there who didn't like "300." *wink*

New titles

[stabiesoft]

While I think the HD players are an excellent cheap up-scaling DVD player, I question there value as a HD player. The catalog is tiny, and more importantly, there will be no new titles. So if I want the latest new release on a HD format, its blu-ray or nothin. I know, lots of people think up-scaled DVD's look just as good as HD, I just don't happen to be one of them. So, for me, I'll be picking up the high priced blu-ray media. I do think the war ended too soon. I was getting a lot of mileage out of the BOGO sales, which have vaporized as you could predict. Oh, and for those that will mention HD downloads, I'm already rolling on the floor with laughter.

Re:New titles

[Bert64]

What about blank HD-DVD media and drives for recording it? Are they available?

Re:New titles

[squiggleslash]

The catalog isn't that tiny, there's some real gems such as most of the major Kubrick films and the Blade Runner collection (which I ordered right after Christmas for $25. Wow. Most awesome DVD set I've ever had, until then it was the Criterion "Brazil" set but the Blade Runner DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray thing blows that away), and, on the other end of the scale, the only high-definition release thus far of the Matrix series. It's worth checking both Amazon.com and Amazon.de as the European releases covered a slightly different collection of movies to those in the US, due to differing distribution rights; and HD DVD is region free so this really is worth doing.

Yes, there are plenty of movies not available on HD DVD. But the catalog isn't "tiny", people were buying DVD players back when the available DVDs were nothing like as plentiful as HD DVD is today.

Re:New titles

[ciscoguy01]

One thing, I had some dealings recently with a guy who worked at a place that manufactures DVDs. A big factory place.
They have HD DVD manufacturing capability, which are made essentially on their old equipment. The same equipment that makes regular DVDs.

Blu Ray? A whole, new, multi million dollar system that could only make Blu Ray, and that's it.

Hardly a good technology if true. Wasteful.

Re:New titles

[TheStonepedo]

Let's play the homophone game:
http://www.answers.com/there
http://www.answers.com/their
Which should you have used in your opening sentence?

I liked the content of your comment and agree with you in most regards. If you use homophones properly people who regularly read and write in English will pay more attention to your posts.

Sincerely,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Grammar Fascist

Re:New titles

[gravis777]

It's worth checking both Amazon.com and Amazon.de as the European releases covered a slightly different collection of movies to those in the US, due to differing distribution rights; and HD DVD is region free so this really is worth doing. I truthfully saw NOTHING on amazon.de that amazon.com did not have in the realm of HD-DVD. I saw ONE movie on Amazon.fr that did not seem to be anywhere else. Amazon.co.uk I got a bit excited about a few BBC releases, until I saw the price tag, and most, if not all, of those can be found on amazon.com. In fact, in my experience, I saw MORE movies on amazon.com than the others, so I would suggest people in Europe check out the American store, instead of the other way around.

In other news, I have had a PS3 for over a year, and picked up an HD-DVD player for $100 at Best Buy with the two movies in the box and send off for 5 movies (which I am not sure if I will ever see now, not sure if Toshiba pulling out would nullify any offers). Just off of Amazon, I picked up 10 movies for $130, and I am a HUGE BluRay supporter. But who cares, I am picking up high-def movies for cheaper than the DVDs. Sleepy Hollow on BluRay and HD-DVD had the exact same transfer, same features, same audio tracks, yet I got the HD-DVD version for $12, whereas the BluRay version was twice that. Then again, I am also the person who frequents the used bookstore and picks up Laserdiscs for $3 a pop.

Someone in another thread was complaining about the slow startup times of BluRay discs. All I can say is that my PS3 starts up WAY faster than my Toshiba A-3 or whatever its called. The Toshiba takes roughly a minute to load up, then about another 45 seconds to read the discs, if it can read them at all (4 out of 5 HD-DVDs I got from Netflix were so scratched that they skipped really bad, one would not even detect it as an HD-DVD and locked up the player), and then if you have a movie like Transformers, you get another 30 second loading screen trying to download stuff off of the web. I have gotten into the habbit where I will turn the player on and then go to the kitchen. My PS3 on the other hand, takes about 5 seconds to load up, then about another 5 seconds to read the disc. Cars, which had to load content, gave me a loading screen for maybe 15 seconds. Still, I was at the menu screen in cars in less time than it even takes to power up the HD-DVD player.

And I think people who complain about the price of the players and the movies forget about the price we paid for DVDs when they came out, or even worse with VCRs. When 25 years ago, a VCR costs around $500, and a prerecorded movie STARTED at $25, can we really complain about the price of HD Media? Its not like the players have not dropped more than half in price in just a year, and places are always running sales on the media, and you can always pick up stuff for cheap on Amazon, who normally sales stuff at buy one - get one free, or something.

Re:New titles

[squiggleslash]

And I think people who complain about the price of the players and the movies forget about the price we paid for DVDs when they came out, or even worse with VCRs. When 25 years ago, a VCR costs around $500, and a prerecorded movie STARTED at $25, can we really complain about the price of HD Media?

Sure we can. VCRs took far longer than DVD to become ubiquitous, and part of their success was due to their multifunctional capabilities - people could record from the TV, and this was pretty much the only way to record shows. The high prices of pre-recorded VHS media meant that most people's VHS libraries were extremely small except for the home-taped component. Video rental stores took off because VHS media was ridiculously expensive: if we had the "$25 for a new release, $15 for a still-popular release, $10 for almost everything else" regime we have for DVD today, then I doubt the rental industry would have gotten the traction it needed to become successful.

BTW, yes, the slow boot-up time of the Toshiba is a downside to those players. I'm told by an Xbox HD DVD user that the latter has nothing like the same issues. Expect the same problem if Toshiba ever produces a Blu-ray player. Of course, you can do what all us Toshiba users do and leave the thing on all the time, though that does mean you don't get to enjoy the player's friendly "Welcome" and "Goodbye!" LED messages quite as often...

Re:New titles

[LunaticTippy]

Now that there is nobody pushing hd-dvd there will never be cheap burners or cheap media for the format. I'm thinking optical discs are doomed in any case. Who is going to bother with blu-ray when 10TB drives are $99?

Re:New titles

[LunaticTippy]

When 25 years ago, a VCR costs around $500, and a prerecorded movie STARTED at $25, can we really complain about the price of HD Media?

Certainly. VCRs were competing with nothing. HD players are competing with easy piracy, nearly-there legal downloads/streaming, $40 dvd players, $10 dvds, as well as legions of failed/failing formats like laserdisc, VHS, etc. where equipment and media are very nearly free.

When there was no option people grudgingly paid outrageous prices for players and media. Now there are many options. You can't get away with it anymore.

Conversion prospects?

[palegray.net]

Given the fact that HD-DVD titles are dirt cheap now, what about the prospect of buying up a lot of titles you want now and converting them to Blu-ray later? This is sort of like people converting VHS titles to DVD a few years ago, but without the problems of degraded quality.

Re:Conversion prospects?

[CastrTroy]

I remember hearing that BluRay would only play encrypted/copy protected content. I'm not sure if I'm misinformed, or just not quite correct on the details, but it was my understanding that there wouldn't be any way of having user created content playable on BluRay.

Re:Conversion prospects?

[MBGMorden]

OR, unless your HD-DVD player breaks (which is possible, but I have 3 "true" DVD players around the house, one of which is about 10 years old, and none have ever broken), why even bother converting? Just keep playing the HD-DVD's.

Re:Conversion prospects?

[king-manic]

I remember hearing that BluRay would only play encrypted/copy protected content. I'm not sure if I'm misinformed, or just not quite correct on the details, but it was my understanding that there wouldn't be any way of having user created content playable on BluRay.

To my knowledge both HD DVD and BluRay will only play copy protected software. HD DVD has the option to play unprotected media but right nwo there isn't any consumer level HD DVD or BluRay authoring software. With the official demise of HD DVD it seems the possibility of a HD DVD authoring suite is slim.

Multi-format players

[Ifni]

Another consideration is that by the time BD players come down in price in a year or two, they are likely to be multiformat players, integrating HD-DVD playback. The technology is already available (http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/09/05/lgs-bh200-hd-dvd-blu-ray-combo-player-set-for--october/), and since there will be a significant market comprised of people that don't want to repurchase their HD-DVD collection, it only makes sense that either this multi-format system will become standard, or be a very low cost option. So all these people taking advantage of cheap HD-DVD players/movies now can also take advantage of low priced Blu-Ray a couple years down the line with almost no down side.

Despite Samsung canceling its next gen combo player (http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006597.html), I think that this is a near term decision - when the market picks up for current model combo players, there will be financial incentive to meet that demand with new products.

Re:Multi-format players

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop twisting the dead turd, HD-DVD is gone.

Re:Multi-format players

[the eric conspiracy]

Nobody is going to be building combo players. It just doesn't make sense to add to the cost of a player for a format where there will be no new software.

Re:Multi-format players

[Ifni]

Right, because I couldn't find 5.25" disk drives nearly a decade after it stopped being used as a distribution medium, and just try buying a 3.5" floppy drive today, because that format is dead and replaced by USB memory sticks. Oh, and no-one's ever heard of a 5.25"/3.5" combo drive - what market could have ever supported the premium on the price to support dead formats. I've never worked with Dell systems where such things were standard. And no-one makes Betamax players anymore, or VCRs, or DAT players - why just the other day I was remarking at how the home media section of Walmart was only DVD and Blu-Ray players - not a VHS player to be found. And most DVD players don't support VCD, or a myriad of other formats that have either passed their hay-day or never found considerable market traction. And, of course, Blu-Ray players will never offer backwards compatibility with DVD, since it is soon to be a dead format.

What was I thinking, ignoring all these previous market trends to the contrary?

Re:Multi-format players

[Ifni]

Hmm, you must be old here - only the experienced elite ignore the article AND the summary and start spouting utter nonsense. From TFA, a quick trip to E-bay will show otherwise.

I think what you meant to say was that HD-DVD will soon be gone, but I beg to differ - the line to beat this particular dead horse is still quite long. Look at your standard DVD player and the formats it supports - hardly anyone uses most of them anymore, but that doesn't stop them from lingering in the list of features. HD-DVD will suffer the same fate - either in Blu-Ray players or in whatever succeeds it, or both.

Re:Multi-format players

[dangitman]

Right, because I couldn't find 5.25" disk drives nearly a decade after it stopped being used as a distribution medium, and just try buying a 3.5" floppy drive today, because that format is dead and replaced by USB memory sticks.

Somebody must have hit you with the stupid stick. The post you were replying to was referring to COMBO players, not being able to get obsolete devices. Did you ever see a 5.25"/3.5" floppy disk combo drive? No? Well, there's your analogy. There is about the same likelihood of seeing HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drives.

And, of course, Blu-Ray players will never offer backwards compatibility with DVD, since it is soon to be a dead format.

Again, idiotic. DVD is an established medium, which everybody uses. It is what people upgrade to Blu-Ray/HD from. Of course it is supported. But a format that is dead, and whose only serious manufacturer has discontinued making? You really think Toshiba is going to revive the corpse just to add it to Blu-Ray players? It would be pointless.

Re:Multi-format players

[PoliTech]

On the question of COMBO drives and floppies, here is a combo drive that reads 3.5 inch floppies, and just about every memory stick type ever conceived.

I can buy an HD-DVD BluRay combo drive today.

Why the deliberately obtuse antagonistic belligerent reply? I won't say that you didn't really know what the hell you were talking about, or that you just jumped at the opportunity to be an ignorant blathering fanboy.

I'm too nice for that.

Re:Multi-format players

[sunspot42]

Somebody must have hit you with the stupid stick. The post you were replying to was referring to COMBO players, not being able to get obsolete devices. Did you ever see a 5.25"/3.5" floppy disk combo drive? No? Well, there's your analogy.

Speaking of being hit with the stupid stick, the 5.25" and 3.5" floppies used completely different form factors, which makes them a poor analogy for HD-DVD and Rlu-Ray, which share pretty much the exact same form factor. It would be a wee bit difficult to produce a "combo" floppy drive economically, though as I recall there actually were a few combo 5.25"/3.5" floppy drives made, with two separate slots, two separate read heads and I believe two separate drive motors. They were produced as a space saving solution for PCs without many drive bays.

There are already "combo" HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drives, and many of the components within them are shared between the two platforms. My understanding is it's just the lenses which have to be duplicated between the two platforms, because of the depth and optical characteristics of the plastic used on Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD (Blu-Ray uses a much thinner, harder plastic). That and the licensing fees . . .

I doubt we'll see any more "combo" players released simply because HD-DVD isn't being supported by its parent - or by the content providers - anymore. That'll suppress demand to the point where there just aren't the economies of scale in place to make manufacturing such devices economical. Had both formats continued to persist in the marketplace though, I think we would have seen combo drives become the norm, with any price premium being slowly quashed over time by increased economies of scale and advancing designs.

Re:Multi-format players

[schnikies79]

I have a 3.5/5.25 combo drive in storage at the moment. I think it was made by IBM.

You could only use one drive or the other, but they were in the same unit.

Re:Multi-format players

[PaK_Phoenix]

Oh but they do exist, I've seen one.

Re:Multi-format players

[Ifni]

Somebody must have hit you with the stupid stick.
If they did, they hit you harder with it. The quote you take provides foundation for the argument based on the original poster's mention of obsolete media. So, I give examples of two types of obsolete media that persisted for quite some time after they were officially (and repeatedly) pronounced dead. Then, just after you stopped quoting (and apparently reading with a reasonable level of comprehension), I mention a combo drive - a 5.25"/3.5" combo drive, as a matter of fact, which yes, I have seen. I have actually USED them, as I mention further in (after you stopped paying attention) when I mentioned Dell's use of the drives. Here is a link http://www.google.com/products?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=3R9&q=5.25+3.5+combo+floppy&um=1&ie=UTF-8 to a Google product search page listing a good number of them that YOU CAN BUY RIGHT THIS MOMENT! And, also, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players that obviously will never exist according to you http://www.google.com/products?q=hd-dvd+blu-ray+combo&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1. So, uh, yeah, your whole argument here was an epic fail.

Again, idiotic.
And yet when DVD is no longer a medium "everybody uses", Blu-Ray players will still support them (assuming anyone actually believes that Blu-Ray will actually succeed DVD). And Toshiba won't have to revive anything - they just have to lower the licensing costs such that they at least make SOMETHING off of the failure of HD-DVD and other manufacturers will add it in. When it costs only a few cents to do so, it will be hard to argue in favor of NOT doing it. And, since there is already a single beam http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/09/new-lasers-from-ricoh-read-both-hd-dvd-and-blu-ray/ solution available, such a cost difference is not unreasonable.
Maybe I'm smoking crack. Maybe Ricoh's laser is significantly more expensive than just a regular blue laser. But I have a reasonable expectation that even if Blu-Ray players don't read HD-DVD by default sometime soon, whatever disc based reader follows (HVD? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc) will. It's just the way it's tended to work in the past. Not always (Laser Disc was too large to incorporate into DVD players), but in cases where the form factor of the physical media lends itself, this tends to be the way old technologies get phased out.

Re:Multi-format players

[toddestan]

I remember DVD/VHS combo players, so it's very plausible - especially since the mechanisms would be essentially the same (as opposed to VHS and DVD).

Re:Multi-format players

[dangitman]

On the question of COMBO drives and floppies, here is a combo drive that reads 3.5 inch floppies, and just about every memory stick type ever conceived.

So how does it read 5.25" floppies? Which was the question, not "can you stick a memory card reader in a floppy drive?"

I can buy an HD-DVD BluRay combo drive today.

For starters, that's not a standalone player that one would use in the living room. It's a computer drive. But anyway, the point is that these are unlikely to be made in the future, as Toshiba has ditched the technology.

I won't say that you didn't really know what the hell you were talking about, or that you just jumped at the opportunity to be an ignorant blathering fanboy.

Fanboy? How could my post be construed as that? If anything, it was anti-fanboy, as I was responding to the delusions of an overly enthusiastic HD-DVD fanboy.

Re:Multi-format players

[dangitman]

Got a link? Sounds to me like it was two drives in a common enclosure, not something where you would use the same mechanism for both formats, which is what we mean by "combo" drive today.

Re:Multi-format players

[dangitman]

Then, just after you stopped quoting (and apparently reading with a reasonable level of comprehension), I mention a combo drive - a 5.25"/3.5" combo drive, as a matter of fact, which yes, I have seen.

The links you provide have no images... but I would be very surpised if this were a true "combo" more likely you are talking about a "dual" drive, with two drive mechanisms mounted together, not a unit that shares a common transport mechanism.

And, also, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players that obviously will never exist according to you http://www.google.com/products?q=hd-dvd+blu-ray+combo&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1. So, uh, yeah, your whole argument here was an epic fail.

My point was not that they don't exist now, but they won't be made in the future. Do you really think they are going to keep making them?

Not always (Laser Disc was too large to incorporate into DVD players), but in cases where the form factor of the physical media lends itself, this tends to be the way old technologies get phased out.

Really? Then why do most DVD burners not support DVD-RAM?

Re:Multi-format players

[dangitman]

though as I recall there actually were a few combo 5.25"/3.5" floppy drives made, with two separate slots, two separate read heads and I believe two separate drive motors.

How is that a "combo" drive? Sounds like a "dual" drive to me. I could gaffer-tape a Blu-Ray player to an HD-DVD player, but that wouldn't make it a "combo". For that, they'd have to share the transport mechanism.

I doubt we'll see any more "combo" players released simply because HD-DVD isn't being supported by its parent - or by the content providers - anymore. That'll suppress demand to the point where there just aren't the economies of scale in place to make manufacturing such devices economical. Had both formats continued to persist in the marketplace though, I think we would have seen combo drives become the norm,

Which is precisely my point. Others keep arguing about previous formats that get back-supported - but those formats were entrenched in the market, they were mainstream. HD-DVD never reached that position, so there's little likelihood of such support. The ordinary DVD dominates the market. HD-DVD doesn't. 5.25 and 3.5" floppies similarly had mass domination. Even Betamax was a lot more successful than HD-DVD.

Re:Multi-format players

[dangitman]

The difference being that DVD and VHS were both the leading formats of their era, and people transitioned from one to the other. Of course, the VHS was recordable, too. Did you ever see a Betamax/DVD player? That's the more appropriate comparison. HD-DVD never even took off, not even to the extent Betamax did.

Re:Multi-format players

[Enahs]

Way to call the pot black, kettle...

The argument here is that combo devices wouldn't make sense because HD DVD is obsolete; you're replying to a long list of examples of obsolete, incompatible devices that are still available. I've never seen a combo floppy drive, but I have seen 3.5"/7-in-1 card reader drives. Also, when you go to Wal-Mart, of those VCRs, most of them probably also have a DVD player built in.

Look, it's like this. The HD DVD and Blu-Ray drives use the same laser, same form factor media, same codecs...the players are expensive NOW but that doesn't mean it has to be that way forever. If China sticks with their CH-DVD plan, it's conceivable that you'll see units that, with minor adjustment, will play both BD and HD, along with playing the umpteen gazillion different 5.25" spinning-disc video formats that have come out in the past few years.

I for one could see this as Chinese movie pirates' foot in the door, as well as a vector for imports and cheap high-def manufacturing. Manufacturing HD discs without retooling DVD manufacturing lines was one of the main benefits of the thing; I doubt that studios and production houses will shell out for low-run things like independent movies (especially straight-to-video...c'mon, pervs, there's straight-to-video OUTSIDE of porn) and exercise videos.

Re:Multi-format players

[dangitman]

The argument here is that combo devices wouldn't make sense because HD DVD is obsolete; you're replying to a long list of examples of obsolete, incompatible devices that are still available.

No, my argument is that it wouldn't make sense because HD-DVD never took off in the first place. The long list of obsolete devices that are still available share one thing in common - they were widely used over a period spanning a number of years. HD-DVD never even came close to those formats in status.

Look, it's like this. The HD DVD and Blu-Ray drives use the same laser, same form factor media, same codecs...

So what? That doesn't mean manufacturers are going to pay extra licensing fees for a format nobody uses. And Toshiba stated they were giving up on it to put an end to the format war. What would dragging it out achieve?

Manufacturing HD discs without retooling DVD manufacturing lines was one of the main benefits of the thing;

That was always a grossly over-inflated argument. It's really not that significant. And again, who is going to manufacture discs for an obsolete format?

I doubt that studios and production houses will shell out for low-run things like independent movies (especially straight-to-video...c'mon, pervs, there's straight-to-video OUTSIDE of porn) and exercise videos.

You're not making sense here. These things do get made, and have always been made on various formats. There's no reason they won't be made on Blu-Ray, and there's no reason to make them on HD-DVD. WRT independent films - those already get distributed on 35mm film to cinemas. That's a lot more expensive than Blu_ray, yet somehow they manage to distribute them globally on film.

I think a lot of people here are really kidding themselves if they think the format has any future whatsoever.

Re:Multi-format players

[sunspot42]

How is that a "combo" drive? Sounds like a "dual" drive to me. I could gaffer-tape a Blu-Ray player to an HD-DVD player, but that wouldn't make it a "combo". For that, they'd have to share the transport mechanism.

Not necessarily. They're still sharing power architecture, interface, and probably control and logic circuitry. They share the same chassis. Just because a gadget has multiple motors doesn't mean it's not a combo-whatever. I've got a combo DVD Recorder VHS Hi-Fi Recorder sitting over by my television. They clearly don't share the same mechanism, but there are some advantages to shoving both technologies into a single case, and the total cost of manufacture is probably less than building two separate devices with two separate power supplies, IR receivers, etc.

Anyhow, I'm not sure exactly what this has to do with HD-DVD & Blu-Ray. Your analogy comparing a combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive to a combo 5.25"/3.5" floppy drive still doesn't make any sense. HD-DVD & Blu-Ray both share the same form factor, can share much of the same control and decode logic, and can share the same drive mechanism. Combo drives are already available.

I agree that HD-DVD lacks the kind of installed base to encourage any kind of manufacturer support down the road, but I'm not sure how crucial that is. If you can rip the discs to a hard drive, you could always leave the content there as a backup, in case your player or your discs go tits up at some point in the future. Devices which can stream HD video are already available, and are sure to grow more common down the road. Hard drives grow cheaper by the day, so storing even a large library of HD-DVDs on a hard drive will cost next to nothing in a couple of years.

Re:Multi-format players

[DrXym]

I think the only manufacturer likely to build HD DVD functionality would be Toshiba. I doubt very others will bother unless they can do so for so little $ that it can be seen as a value added feature.

Re:Multi-format players

[Anonymous Coward]

The R&D for dual format players is done, and the only marginal cost is hardware to adjust the numerical aperture of the lens. This is a cheap feature, and every early adopter who guessed wrong (which is what, half of them?) is going to choose a player that still supports their recent library over one that doesn't. For at least the next eight months (until the mainstream starts to dwarf the early adopters) it should be a big win.

Me, I didn't even buy a DVD burner until they supported both -R and +R. I was simply offended at the very idea of doing such shoddy engineering that they wouldn't bother, and I try to support vendors who solve these problems rather than cause them.

Re:Multi-format players

[Mana Mana]

So the moral is: when media wars erupt make certain physical media dimensions are interchangeable! IWO, betamax small, vhs big cassette. hdvdv, bd (is this the new acronym for br? and wtf does everybody capitalize them -invariably-. Batshit crazy tom been making house calls otherwise) even cds are same size.

Re:Multi-format players

[PoliTech]

Now youre narrowing your expected definition of COMBO drive. Since the only difference in the floppy question is form factor (because the media and mechanisms are nearly identical except for media size itself) the comparison isn't really accurate.

Does anyone remember Super Disk drives? Those were a combo drive that would accept traditional 3.5 inch floppies in addition to being able to read and write its native 120 MB (later 240 MB) disks. These drives used the same slot and mechanism for read write of two highly disparate formats.

Actually the comparison of this media works on a number of levels. The floppy was long outmoded and of insufficient capacity for several years, but the drive was still deemed necessary to at least read historical data. The introduction of the LS-120 and the later variant LS-240 SuperDisk was too little, too late. By 2000, the entire removable-disk category quickly faced obsolescence because of CD-R and CD-RW drives.

The more I think about this the more I see a parallel in the current situation; with Bluray being the "Super Disk" (HD-DVD could possibly be considered the "Zip" drive) and with the entire category of removable optical media facing overall obsolescence due to the higher capacity of solid-state (USB flash drives or SSD hard disks). Eventually owners of BluRay optical media may end up, like owners of SuperDisks, in possession of a device with a quietly discontinued format, and it's media becoming hard to find.

More likely, we may just end up with more of the same the alphabet soup that we already enjoy with optical media and it may well include the HD-DVD in the string of formats listed before it's all over.

Re:Multi-format players

[PoliTech]

You're correct in that the Optical media to Floppy 5.25 & 3.5 formats comparison is flawed. (see my reply above about Super Disks)

I use a computer in my living room, so for me the difference between a standalone and a computer drive is not that great.

You have to admit that your original post sounded like you were sipping the Sony Kool-Aid before hitting the submit button.

Re:Multi-format players

[PoliTech]

I think a lot of people here are really kidding themselves if they think the format has any future whatsoever.

I think you've missed the point then. The point is that HD-DVD is a quick, cheap and dirty way to obtain HD quality playback economically right now. The format may or may not be included on optical devices in the future, depending on whether the manufacturers think they will gain a little edge on the competition by offering backwards compatibility in new devices as they are designed in the future.

If it's easy enough, the manufacturers generally err on the side of adding the format's capability. Thus we already see products that look like this SAMSUNG Blu-ray and HD DVD Hi-Def Duo Player BD-UP5000. A standalone combo player available today that works with both formats.

Is the benefit of cheap HD right now worth the risk that the backwards compatibility may not ever appear? For some it obviously is worth the risk and thus the speculation about said future compatibility.

Re:Multi-format players

[dangitman]

Now youre narrowing your expected definition of COMBO drive.

No, my definition of "combo" drive has always been one that uses the same physical transport mechanism, but differs on issues of format and protocol. Sure, others may have a different definition, but this has never been standardized. I would refer to those which use two different mechanisms in a common enclosure as "dual format". Anyway, semantic differences aside...

I find your comparison with Zip drives to be fairly pertinent. Although I think you have the details backwards. The "Super Disk Drives" are more like HD-DVD, in that very few people used them, and even fewer people remember them. A total non-starter. Blu-Ray may work out like Zip drives - briefly popular, but ultimately a short-lived phenomenon and overall failure. Zip drives briefly filled a niche before CD-R became viable. They were standard among certain industries like pre-press and graphics for a while. A little like the way Minidisc had an elusive moment in the sun.

Personally, I think HD-DVD is more like the Magneto-optical drive. When I was at university, our computer graphics lab had these installed instead of Zip drives. I don't think anybody else on the planet had a mass installation of these things. We had to buy extremely expensive MO disks for them, when almost every student already owned at least one Zip disk.

I find the way you equate HD-DVD to the Zip, and Blu-Ray to the "Super Disk" to be quite curious, as the Zip enjoyed a brief popularity that the Super Disk never did, and Blu-Ray is already way more popular than HD-DVD, in a way the Super Disk never was.

Re:Multi-format players

[dangitman]

Forgot link.

Re:Multi-format players

[PoliTech]

Funny thing about that, I have a Super Disk in the computer I'm using right now. The Zip and Jazz drives are in a box in the closet.

Re:Multi-format players

[Ifni]

Fanboy? How could my post be construed as that? If anything, it was anti-fanboy, as I was responding to the delusions of an overly enthusiastic HD-DVD fanboy.
Ah, the irony. I own neither an HD-DVD nor a Blu-Ray player. I intend to purchase neither. From the beginning I have deemed both formats as too little, too late, and vowed to avoid them. I own neither a PS3 nor an X-box, so I haven't even fallen into the "it doubles as an HD player" sand trap. I also have no interest in either as an "upscaling DVD player". I'm waiting out this generation until the next, then I'll see if that looks more viable.

But you had to assume that I was a fanboi so that you could call me stupid for stating a an opinion that was impartial and developed based on observation of previous market trends. But who am I to criticize you for an unprovoked assault on a reasoned argument? This is Slashdot, so it's to be expected. Presumably by now you realize what an ass you were being and feel a little humbled by your momentary lapse in judgment. I don't expect an apology, as those almost never happen on Slashdot, and it's enough that I know in my heart that you are sorry, or at least that you made a fool of yourself in front of hundreds or thousands.

Re:Multi-format players

[Ifni]

Really? Then why do most DVD burners not support DVD-RAM? Huh? http://hometheater.about.com/od/toppicks/tp/aatpdvdrecorder.htm These are the current top picks for consumer DVD recorders, and at least the top two both support DVD-RAM. Even computer drives http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827151155 still support it. So I'm wondering why you keep defending your position with verifiably wrong facts.

Re:Multi-format players

[schnikies79]

It is two separate drives in a common unit and only used one interface and power plug between the two.

The same slot doesn't read both disks. It has the 3.5 slot right about the 5.25 slot.

$60?

[TheRealMindChild]

Who pays $60 for a DVD player when you can get one for $30?

Re:$60?

[Nylathotep]

ones who understand what native upscalers do for hdtvs.

Re:$60?

[myz24]

Except that all HDTVs have upscalers in them already...of varying quality.

Re:$60?

[gwait]

Exactly!

It may well be that the Toshiba HD players have the best upscalers in them, but all that implies is that the upscalers in the HD displays are crap (which would not be surprising, given that the display manufacturers want you to buy HD everything, so why make an effort at having your old DVDs look good on the display?).

So, if a DVD HD player makes a good DVD upscaler, and you can buy it dirt cheap, why the heck not!

The blueray player price rise someone mentioned here could really shoot Sony in the foot. Hi def downloads over bittorrent are already possible now.

I'll adopt...

[Arthur B.]

...a linux box, xine and bittorrent.
I mean, HD-DVDs ? Physical disks ? Dust ? Uuuh.

Besides, frankly speaking, this early adopter rush probably has nothing to do with a taste for high quality and everything to do with a pissing contest with your neighbors.

Re:I'll adopt...

[phillips321]

i'll second that, my 24" 1920x1200 monitor, torrents and mplayer do just fine for me.

torrents can be substituted with ftp if you know someone in the circle ;)

embellishment

[burnin1965]

What really drives this is Blu-ray's skimpy catalog, which will take a couple of years to pump up.

The articles itself was interesting and looks spot on, however this embellished comment on the article is inaccurate. Amazon lists over 500 HD-DVD titles and over 700 Blu-Ray titles. It seems someone is grasping at anything to save face on a lost cause.

With a large volume of HD content available for the dead format and the player/movie prices heavily cut to move inventory it should be no surprise they are selling. Thats the point of the massive price cuts, to clear out the inventory of the dead format.

Is this bad news for Blu-Ray? Hardly, once the inventory for this dead format is depleted it will be a Blu-Ray market until a viable alternative is developed. I doubt we'll get any meaningful agreement between hardware manufacturers, software developers, content producers, and telecom providers that will enable a meaningful replacement for Blu-Ray any time soon.

Re:embellishment

[CastrTroy]

I don't think digital distribution will be a replacement for physical disks anytime soon. If you want to know why, take for example, the WiiShop channel on Christmas day, You couldn't even get on, let alone get to the point where you could download a game. And that's just for downloading tiny ROMS. Using physical disks allows studios to release a very large number of disks to the public, and have almost everybody who wants a copy, gets a copy. Digital distribution of 50 GB HD movies won't be feasible for quite a while. If everybody with a cable connection started to download 50 GB a month, the ISPs would quickly raise rates to account for the massive increase in bandwidth.

Re:embellishment

[Timinithis]

Raising their costs would still not raise their bandwidth. They will still take the profits and not improve the infrastructure, leaving the bandwidth allocation to the same method they use now -- throttling.

Leaving the customer to wait and wait, and hopefully "realize" that it is available now on iPPV/In Demand for $4.99 and pay for that rather than use up all the bandwidth downloading a 100% legitimate movie from the copyright holder....

Re:embellishment

[cgenman]

If you want to know why, take for example, the WiiShop channel on Christmas day, You couldn't even get on, let alone get to the point where you could download a game.

If I follow your argument correctly, you're saying that digital distribution is doomed because demand has been higher than expected?

Re:embellishment

[Cowclops]

Actually, I think he was getting at the point that the supply (of internet bandwidth) was significantly less than the demand for games and the content producers won't have any direct control over your internet connection.

If the demand for a DVD is higher than expected, they press more copies.

If the demand for a download is higher than expected, they scratch their heads and say "damn, the internet is too slow." Its not that there aren't long term solutions, its just that the ONLY way to improve bandwidth is to outlay the cash required to upgrade all the routers and wires and everything needed.

Re:embellishment

[smoker2]

... the ISPs would quickly raise rates to account for the massive increase in bandwidth.

If there were a massive increase in bandwidth, there wouldn't be a problem.
Maybe you meant a massive increase in traffic over the available bandwidth ?

Always surf the wave's trailing edge

[rbrander]

Such a ridiculous premium is put on technology costs by the "first on my block" factor, and so much value is ignored by the "fear of obsolescence" that great economies can be had by doing the opposite - jumping on technologies as they start to age.

Everybody who buys computers knows there's a "sweet spot" in price/performance that's about in the middle of the pack. If 1TB drives are just available, and you can still get 80GB drives but no smaller (not new), the the lowest $/GB is going to be around the 500GB size.

Well, the sweet spot for consumer entertainment boxes has tended to be near the trailing edge for over a decade now, not the middle. Unlike computer parts, there's very little Moore's Law involved.

I got a DVD player when they hit $300, and watched about 20 movies on it by the time they'd dropped below $100. So those 20 movies cost me $5 each to rent, and $10 each to own the player that early; I bought too soon.

Better results came from buying a LaserDisc AFTER the DVD had been announced and LD's dropped like a stone. I got it for a couple of hundred, watched several dozen movies on it before they were being sold from the stores, bought 20 discs for $5 each, and am still watching them one-by-one (and it's barely less good than DVD). In addition, it's now a conversation piece, a historical curio.

People still buy technology with the wrong, wrong mindset that it is a capital asset, that it will last a long time like a house, or at least a good car. It's not. It won't last that long anymore; not just the gadget, the ENTIRE FORMAT. My tapes lasted 20 years, DVD came and went in about 10, Blu-Ray is widely expected to be obsoleted by (often downloaded) AVI files in less than 10.

So treat it as an operating-money decision instead. Figure out the number of movies you watch in a year - if you're out of the dating years, have a family, generally Have A Life, it's probably less than 30, may be under 20. Then figure a five-year lifespan for a format these days, and that's the number of discs you'll play: maybe 100-150. Paying $600 for a player is $4-$6 per disc. Add then rental, and are you sure you don't just want to go to the theatre?

Re:Always surf the wave's trailing edge

[poormanjoe]

Add then rental, and are you sure you don't just want to go to the theatre?

There is nothing family orientated about a trip to the local picture show. Every single time I goto the theater I am annoyed or offended.

The ultimate combination for the casual TV viewer is a modern antenna mounted on your house plus Netflix for the remainder of your desired special programming

Re:Always surf the wave's trailing edge

[nasor]

Add then rental, and are you sure you don't just want to go to the theatre? Since it costs $9/ticket for adults at the theaters in my town, it's a minimum of $18/movie for my wife and I to go to the theater - and see the movie once. At 20 movies/year for 5 years, that's $1800 total. So no, it's still an easy choice to rent movies and watch them at home. Especially since you have the convenience of starting when you want, being able to stop the movie if you want to, etc. For the price of a trip to the theater you can usually purchase the movie, especially if you're willing to wait a few months. If you don't mind buying used disks that the rental store, you can get virtually any movie for around $10 - almost half the price of a trip to the theater, and then you *own* the disk and can watch it forever if you wish.

Re:Always surf the wave's trailing edge

[moosesocks]

People still buy technology with the wrong, wrong mindset that it is a capital asset, that it will last a long time like a house, or at least a good car. It's not. It won't last that long anymore; not just the gadget, the ENTIRE FORMAT. My tapes lasted 20 years, DVD came and went in about 10, Blu-Ray is widely expected to be obsoleted by (often downloaded) AVI files in less than 10.

The difference these days is that optical medium have been, for the large part, backward compatible.

I can play CDs in my DVD player. Pioneer make (made?) a few giant DVD players that could accept LD, and HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players both play DVDs.

Given that DVDs offer what is already "pretty darn good" quality (in some cases approaching that of the original source material), it's not as likely that we'll see people flocking out to replace their DVD collections with Blu-Ray. The quality difference between Blu-Ray and "old fashioned" DVD isn't even remotely as wide as the gap was between VHS and DVD.

Blu-Ray/HD-DVD are evolutionary improvements to an existing medium. DVD could easily be considered a revolutionary new medium. Taking that into account, 20-30 years doesn't seem all that foolish of a guess for the lifespan of optical media as a format. 15 years for DVD, another 10-15 for Blu-Ray, and perhaps a few more for something that hasn't been invented yet.

Re:Always surf the wave's trailing edge

[rbrander]

Sorry, I guess I have to spell out the second half of my argument; my post was getting long, so I left it implied.

I didn't mean to say, "so it never makes sense to go to the theatre", I meant "it starts getting less attractive with a $600 player", much less a $900 player.

Now contrast surfing the wave's trailing edge. Buy the player when they drop below $180, which is also to say, start renting discs when the first bargain shelf appears at the video store and Wal-Mart starts selling remaindered Blu-Rays for $9.99 and less.

For a few years' wait, you're down to a couple of dollars per viewing.

I have an HD set, and am into my second year of just using it to enjoy DVDs in widescreen and resolution-doubled. If my satellite company, now starting it's 3rd year of offering a 25-hr HD-DVR, offers a version with double that much hard drive this year, I'll buy into that and get 1080i, otherwise, next year. And that will keep me happy for a year before I want to see what 1080p is like. The $180/bargain-shelf/Wal-Mart future should have come by then.

Re:Always surf the wave's trailing edge

[jacobw]

I agree 100% with your advice. I'm doing something similar with video games--I bought a PS2 just about the time the PS3 was introduced, and as a long-time Mac user who recently got Boot Camp, I'm also catching up on a decade of great PC games. At this point, my gaming habit is very nearly free-- when I finish a game, I can swap it on a site like Swapshop for nothing more than the cost of postage.

I'm finding there's a major savings of time as well as money. That is, I'm not wasting time playing crap games, because by the time a game is a few years old, there's a pretty clear consensus on whether it's any good.

The downside is that, for sufficiently geeky guys (which includes me and most of my friends), videogaming replaces sports as a subject of conversation, and not being up on the latest games can interfere with your ability to smalltalk. Also, for online games, it can be harder to find servers after a game's popularity has peaked. But on the balance, it's well worth the tradeoffs.

Re:Always surf the wave's trailing edge

[syousef]

DVD came and went in about 10

That's news to me. That's still what they're renting most of at the "video" store. How long it takes BD to be taken up is yet to be seen. As for download content, they're not offering it in a way that's worth the effort. When I can download it to home and watch it on my TV not the computer in my lounge room with my wife and a bag of microwave popcorn then we'll talk. DVD isn't dead. It's not even half dead yet.

Re:Always surf the wave's trailing edge

[stewbacca]

People still buy technology with the wrong, wrong mindset that it is a capital asset, Frankly, I don't believe anyone can claim to know the first reason why other people buy technology.

Wow the media finally figured it out.

[Xest]

Frankly I don't give a damn whether I can see some actors face in all it's blemished detail, what I do care about is the likes of Planet Earth, Galapagos and so forth in HD.

Fact is, picking up a firesale HD-DVD player + Planet Earth, Galapagos and so on in HD-DVD as well as a few films that do actually suit HD well such as 300 and Transformers I've been able to get the content I actually want to see in HD early. I'd never buy an HD player for the likes of the Bourne series, simply because I already think Matt Damon is an idiot and I don't particularly care about watching a high definition idiot in my room, I'm quite content with people like him remaining standard definition, and in not watching that sort of thing in HD I don't feel like I've lost out on anything whatsoever.

I guess to put it another way, some films you watch for the fantastic visuals, others you watch for the story. The story based films really don't make much difference whether they'd HD or standard def. but you'd never watch something like Planet Earth for the story, whilst it's interesting the main pull to it is the fantastic visuals that make you realise how amazing our planet actually is so I had a choice. Do I wait god knows how long for a Bluray player to come down to £50 - maybe 2years or more? or do I just buy an HD-DVD player addon for my 360 for £50 and enjoy the content I actually care about seeing in HD right now. To me it's really a no brainer, as has been mentioned previously on Slashdot, it's not as if the 360's HD-DVD drive can't be used on a computer to rip the content to disc and burn to a Bluray disc sometime down the road anyway when the prices for burning Bluray discs becomes reasonable.

Some people look at me funny when I say I bought an HD-DVD player and a few films, but I struggle to find myself as being the joke when I've paid £90 for the same player + content they're paying over £300 for. I'm still possibly going to buy Bluray down the line, I just aint going to pay anything over £100 for it. It's all too easy for some people to overlook common sense and logical action due to over the top brand loyalty. I understand there may be some people who do want to see their favourite actors in all their high definition glory rather than enjoy the storyline but I'm not one of those and plenty of others aren't - for those of us who only watch story based discs for the story then even 700mb XviD (i.e. not quite as good as DVD quality even) is plenty good enough.

Re:Wow the media finally figured it out.

[Buran]

I struggle to find myself as being the joke when I've paid £90 for the same player + content they're paying over £300 for.

You'll be singing a different tune when they spent that money just once and can continue to enjoy new releases while you spent that money once AND have to spend the additional money again when you find that you can't buy anything new that will play on your player. And you'll have to either dispose of the thing or figure out how to make it all fit in your TV stand or whatever you use. You're out a fair bit more money in the end than those who couldn't wait and jumped the gun before the war was over.

Re:Wow the media finally figured it out.

[nacturation]

I guess to put it another way, some films you watch for the fantastic visuals, others you watch for the story. Or, to take a less piecemeal approach, a movie experience is a combination of the visuals, the audio, and the inherent movie content which includes story, acting, etc. You might watch Planet Earth for its great visuals but if you're playing the audio on not-very-good stereo speakers then you're missing out on a great part of the experience. HD content with a good setup gives you the best of all aspects of the movie and, while you may be satisfied with only a few of them, others want to get the best possible experience.

Re:Wow the media finally figured it out.

[manekineko2]

Maybe not when you work out the economics of it. He can quite possibly buy an HD DVD player, a bunch of movies, and in a couple years throw them all in the trash and buy a Blu-ray player and those same movies and still come out ahead in terms of total money spent. In which case I think the joke is really on the Blu-ray early adopters.

Just to make my point with numbers:
100 HD DVD Player
50 10 HD DVD movies @ 5 each
V 3 years pass
100 Blu-ray Player
150 10 Blu-ray Movies @ 15 each
=total 400 + time value of money due to most expenses being backloaded

Versus

300 Blu-ray Player
200 10 Blu-ray Movies @ 20 each
=total 500 today

Re:Wow the media finally figured it out.

[Xest]

I'm not sure how you work out that I'm going to end up spending more? I'm not fussed about Bluray until it comes down below £100, I spent £90 on HD-DVD so far including all the content I require. At most I'll be spending £190 therefore to have my current HD kit and switch to Bluray (I wont switch current content to Bluray, no need it's fine in HD-DVD and I can rip it to my PC/Bluray regardless). £190 is still less than the current £200 - £300 I'd need to spend on Bluray and others will have already had to spend to go Bluray.

It's cheaper all round, the difference is I don't have to wait 2 years+

Re:Wow the media finally figured it out.

[Anonymous Coward]

isnt sony that company that well and truly lost the console war?

LOL YES YES IT IS!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA sucks for those who bought a PS3 and chose completely the wrong console this time round!!!!

poor sony fanboy crying that he made completely the wrong choice and got raped by nintendo and even microsoft with their red ring of death console LOL live with it crybaby

Re:Wow the media finally figured it out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you give a damn if you can slow-mo through any one of Jessica Alba's bikini scuba scenes in "Into the Blue?"

Those alone are worth buying the damn player and movie... ;-)

Cost Justification of PS3

[poormanjoe]

If it so happens you want the following and your situation lacks all of the following then the price is already around what TFA quotes.
$133 for Blu-Ray
$133+External HDD for HTPC (Yellow Dog 6.0)
$133 for gaming console

Re:Cost Justification of PS3

[DaveCBio]

Okay, I think that was English, but it made no sense at all. What are you talking about? Where can you get a $133 BR player or HTPC or new gaming console?

Re:Cost Justification of PS3

[poormanjoe]

133+133+133=399
$399=the cost of a PS3
A PS3 can be used as a blu-ray player, a HTPC, and as a gaming console.

So if you have none of those cool guy toys, then you can justify the initial cost ($399) of a PS3 because you actually get 3 useful toys in 1. Although I must be honest, I haven't set up my PS3 as a HTPC, but have installed Yellow Dog 6.0.

PS3 Stands for Playstation 3. It can be bought at Best Buy.

Re:Cost Justification of PS3

[DaveCBio]

It's still $399. It can play some video formats, but not all and you can't load your own CODECs on it. It's not really a fully functional HTPC. As a console it's fine as long as the games are what you want. Some people do not want a strangely shaped game console in their home theater systems. As a BR player it's one of the best options, but it's still $400. If all I want to do it play HD movies I have to pay a minimum of $400 for a future proof player and that sucks no matter how you slice it.

I'm a chronic early adopter

[elrous0]

I adopted DVD in 1997 (just months after it came out) with a $450 player (at that time, one of the cheapest on the market). I have no regrets. I got a well-built machine that has lasted almost 11 years now (my parents still use it). That premium got me several years headstart over those still wasting $ on VHS tapes and a machine that was very decent and built to last (unlike many of the cheapo DVD players today).

I also bought into HD-DVD (bought the $180 xbox 360 add-on drive when it first came out). That $180 got me the ability to watch movies in high-def, access to HD-DVD discs that were generally much cheaper than their blu-ray counterparts, and access to many great exclusives (like the Battlestar Galactica HD-DVD boxset) not available on blu-ray. And it's not like any of that stuff I've already bought is going to turn into a pumpkin now that HD-DVD is dead. It also gives me access to some great clearance deals on discs now. No regrets

I also bought a blu-ray player (PS3 after the first price drop for $500). Gives me access to blu-ray discs and exclusives, a good gaming system with potential, full hardware backwards compatibility for my PS2/PS1 games (it's the original 60GB American model). And it's easily upgradable. No regrets.

I'm sick of hearing about the "dangers" of early adoption. IMHO, it's almost always worth it (as long as you don't go crazy with the top-of-the line stuff). Early adoption can buy you years of fun ahead of everyone else and rarely becomes truly worthless even if your chosen format "loses."

Re:I'm a chronic early adopter

[vipz]

I have an Xbox 360. Now that the HD-DVD add-on is only $50, I'm pondering about getting it. What exactly can I do with the drive? Besides hooking it up to the Xbox and play HD-DVDs, that is.

Re:I'm a chronic early adopter

[elrous0]

It is useful for playing regular DVD's too (and you can still keep a game in the main 360 drive without always having to swap them out). One of the coolest things for me was that (with a simple USB extension cable) I could put the drive beside me on the table beside the couch, while keeping the 360 and other components under the TV. It's small and unobtrusive and no more having to get up to change movies (yes, I'm that lazy).

Re:I'm a chronic early adopter

[maxume]

I feel the need to point out that renting a movie on VHS and wasting money on VHS tapes aren't quite the same thing. Sure, the playback experience isn't nearly as nice, but the movie is still pretty much there at a cost of $2. Anybody that bought (new, un-discounted)tapes after DVD came out is a loon, but that's only a part of the group of people who waited to buy a DVD player.

Re:I'm a chronic early adopter

[elrous0]

Walk into any Best Buy and you would find blu-rays averaging $5-$10 more than HD-DVD's. It's better online, but HD-DVD's are definitely NOT more expensive, on average.

Re:I'm a chronic early adopter

[elrous0]

No, today they're probably even cheaper. I was referring to BEFORE it died. HD-DVD's have always been cheaper, on average, than their blu-ray counterparts--especially at retailers like Best Buy.

Prior art

[johnw]

In its way, rather similar to what happened with the 3" floppy disc drive. For a while the two battled it out, then it became clear that 3.5" had won out, but then Alan Sugar made use of the fact that the price of 3" drives had dropped to practically nothing and put them in the Amstrad PCW256. Unfortunately, production of the media had pretty much stopped so for a while the drives were quite a lot cheaper than a box of 10 discs (which was more surprising then than it would be now).

The Amstrad box was so popular that production of 3" discs had to be restarted and 3" drives got a whole new lease of life. Still died in the end though.

Re:Prior art

[glitch23]

In its way, rather similar to what happened with the 3" floppy disc drive.

Just as an FYI and future reference, "disc" is reserved for optical media while "disk" is for magnetic (hard or soft media). So if you have seen CD expanded to "compact disk" it is wrong as far as the nomenclature is concerned. And yes I am aware your ID is a lot lower than mine but when something is factually incorrect it is factually incorrect.

Re:Prior art

[johnw]

Just as an FYI and future reference, "disc" is reserved for optical media while "disk" is for magnetic (hard or soft media). Bollocks. The two spellings have been used interchangeably for years. Whilst it might be true to say that the trademark "Compact disc" requires the "C" spelling, extrapolating from this to your general rule is purely wishful thinking.

It is true that "disk" is more common in the USA, whilst "disc" is (or was) more common in English English, but all these things are becoming very blurred.

Re:Prior art

[glitch23]

I'm not sure how many I have to post before you are convinced but here goes:
Exhibit A (most reliable) from Apple

Exhibit B (least reliable but similar to what you said) is here

Exhibit C (medium reliability) from Washington State University

In the end, I believe they all support what I said.

Re:Prior art

[ChrisRed]

Well they are used interchangeably in the UK. I think it may be different in the US since the Cambridge Dictionary lists it as:

Definition

disc, US ALSO disk

noun [C]

1. a circular flat object:
   The dog's name was engraved on a little metal disc attached to its collar.
   See also CD; disk.

2. a small piece of cartilage (= a strong elastic body tissue) between the bones in your back
   
3. a musical record or a compact disc
   

(from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)

from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=22084&dict=CALD

I wonder what the correct spelling for the disk in SSD is?

Re:Prior art

[glitch23]

They aren't used interchangeably based on what you quoted. If you notice, they are using a compact disc as the definition for "disc". If I look up "disk" I get:

Definition
disk, UK ALSO disc

noun [C]

a flat circular device, usually inside a square container, which has a magnetic covering and is used for storing computer information

See also disc; floppy (disk); hard disk.

As you can see, it specifies "magnetic covering". Just because it says "ALSO disc" or "ALSO disk" doesn't mean they are interchangeable, only that other definitions/examples are filed under the other word precisely because there is a distinction.

I wonder what the correct spelling for the disk in SSD is?

It is "disk". Most people use "disk" when referring to SSD although some sites in a google search use "disc". Wikipedia uses "disk" as shown here:

Even though solid state disk (SSD) technology has been marketed to the military and niche industrial markets since the mid-1990s, it is only recently that the enterprise sector has taken notice of the benefits that SSDs can offer as key SSD technologies emerge, prices drop and several case studies, along with analyst reports, are published.

Re:Prior art

[thorndt]

OPs comment about the 3.5 inch drive's history was informative, interesting. The comment taking someone to task about the proper usage of the words "disc" and "disk" on an informal internet forum post...not so much.

Re:Prior art

[Anonymous Coward]

D stands for "drive". That's actually somewhat bogus, because the medium isn't easily removable, but when it contains nothing even round (much less spinning) calling it a "disk" would be ridiculous.

Start laughing in 5 years

[PrescriptionWarning]

"Oh, and for those that will mention HD downloads, I'm already rolling on the floor with laughter." - parent

iTunes has already made a lot of progress for music, movies will most assuredly follow. All it will take is something like a Tivo that can purchase movies online and allow you back them up for playback on your home PC (presumably after loggin in online) or the "tivo" you purchased it from. And if netflix ever starts actually putting good, and new movies, online for download, which is certainly in their benefit since they dont pay any shipping and handling fees....well you can see where this will go. The prices of server hardware is dropping as always, and very soon we will start seeing better options for downloading video than iTunes et al.

Re:Start laughing in 5 years

[the eric conspiracy]

iTunes has already made a lot of progress for music, movies will most assuredly follow.

I don't think there is anything assured about it. iTunes has been a winner for pop singles, but hasn't made a dent in the album market or in other genres. HD movies are an entirely different ballgame from pop singles. 30 GB vs. 5MB is huge factor.

iTunes works for 'music as background noise' that you don't pay any real attention to, much like car radio and elevator music.

HD Movies are a very different usage scenario.

Re:Start laughing in 5 years

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I'd rather download a 700MB xvid or divx than a DVD iso. Time is significant. The quality is acceptable. Maybe its time to bring back XVCD?

Re:Start laughing in 5 years

[civilizedINTENSITY]

As soon as you could buy just the music you wanted, the "album market" was dead. There won't be any more "dents" in that dead horse. Movies make sense, but not at even 4.1GB. We need a return to xvid and/or divx compression and cool VCDs, which would be download-able.

Re:Start laughing in 5 years

[wvmarle]

Here in Hong Kong, a lot of the movies sold are actually still in VCD format. Most of the movies I have we bought for HK$5-10 (USD 0.6-1.2) each, legally I always have to add as this is Hong Kong we're talking about. Maybe not the newest stuff but good enough for an evening of entertainment.
Most of the movies do not go bad when they get older. They become a bit dated, but not worse or better. And the vast majority we watch only once anyway. Or am I really alone in that once-watching?

Re:Start laughing in 5 years

[the eric conspiracy]

A lot of people own HDTVs now. VCDs etc. are a non-starter.

Re:Start laughing in 5 years

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Most people who own computers have higher than HDTV resolution. Yet HDTV isn't a non-starter. Obviously it isn't for every venue, but I've seen people quite surprised at the resolution a decent 700 MB xvid compressed video will attain. Likewise, the fact that a lot of people own nice stereos (and more people own nice stereos than HDTV) doesn't mean MP3s are a non-starter...

Re:Start laughing in 5 years

[the eric conspiracy]

1. I seriously doubt that more people own nice stereos than HDTVs.
2. I own a nice stereo and MP3's are very much a non-starter for me. SACD or DVD-A is what I prefer although a well-mastered CD is ok. Pop music is so atrociously engineered these days that I can't listen to it at all.
3. HDTV isn't a non-starter because there is no competing digital format with higher resolution, If there was I'd be using it.
4. XVID? Less than DVD quality when I have an HDTV? I don't think so. Have you ever seen an XVID on a 50+" HDTV? Looks like crap.

Re:Start laughing in 5 years

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Well its nice to see you finally agreeing with me. Thank you.

Most people who own computers have higher than HDTV resolution. Yet HDTV isn't a non-starter. Obviously it isn't for every venue, but I've seen people quite surprised at the resolution a decent 700 MB xvid compressed video will attain.

The day you start downloading MP3s (which are a non-starter for you), and downloading movies (which you say would be a non-starter with compression for the same exact reason), is the day your opinion is relevant to the demographic to which I directed my observation. The existence of other markets doesn't imply the other markets are the only markets. Or are you suggesting no one would ever buy or use an MP3 player?

Re:Start laughing in 5 years

[the eric conspiracy]

I am suggesting that the popularity of overcompressed crappy quality downloadable mp3's is not a meaningful predictor for the popularity of overcompressed crappy quality download movies.

Yes but...

[roc97007]

I can agree with the economics, but there are social issues to deal with, to wit: my wife isn't a-gonna go for me investing in yet another dead format. Not only do I have to explain why I bought into a format already defunct, but years from now when the player finally gives up, I have to explain why we have to buy those movies over again. Yeah, I only paid $6 back in 2008, but with the spousal unit, that's not the point.

And in a way, I can agree with her. Yes, if I play my cards right and spend some time on it, I can squeeze some value out of the demise of HD-DVD, but is it really worth my time?

And so, I continue to baby my two year old chinese DVD player while prices come down on blu-ray.

To really compare to the Beta vs VHS war..

[SirStiff]

..I think everyone is forgetting just how long that battle lasted. Beta VCRs came out circa 1975, and I don't believe any victory was conceded to VHS until about 1985 or later. Even though VHS always had the market edge, Beta users were still able to find units and most of the same titles at rental stores until the 90's. And just so I'm not completely talking out of my ass, I guess I'd better check Wikipedia... yup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax.

That being said, is there still a chance for HD-DVD to come out on top again, especially considering the points in the above article?

Re:To really compare to the Beta vs VHS war..

[NevarMore]

That being said, is there still a chance for HD-DVD to come out on top again, especially considering the points in the above article?

Very little and it has nothing to do with the article. The reason HD-DVD is done is because Toshiba said its not going to pursue HD-DVD anymore. They learned and realized that Sony made a mistake by dragging a format war over a decade. Thats a huge investment to make for a technology where the market will only support one standard.

This isn't like the console wars or the OS wars where there is room in the market for a few options. Consumers, studios, manufacturers, don't want to have to deal with movies in multiple formats its a pain in the ass for everyone.

Re:To really compare to the Beta vs VHS war..

[NorQue]

This isn't like the console wars or the OS wars where there is room in the market for a few options. Consumers, studios, manufacturers, don't want to have to deal with movies in multiple formats its a pain in the ass for everyone.

How is publishing a Film for different formats more of a pain in the ass for "Consumers, studios, manufacturers" then porting a game to different plattforms?

Re:To really compare to the Beta vs VHS war..

[king-manic]

How is publishing a Film for different formats more of a pain in the ass for "Consumers, studios, manufacturers" then porting a game to different plattforms? Since both formats are the same in audio and visual quality, then it's a lot extra expense only to appease a small number of HD DVD early adopters. It doesn't make any economic sense. for Retailers they need to stock titles in duplicate wasting display space. For consumers they need to be aware which one will play in their machine and also buy 2 machines or a more expensive combo player to get the movies they want. For the Studio they have to do menuing, mastering, and packaging twice or risk excluding part of the market. For manufacturing it means that you need twice as many facilities to be able to accept all jobs that may come your way. For everybody involved multiple formats is a loss. Multiple manufacturers with standardized formats is a much better idea.

did the math

[gEvil (beta)]

I grabbed a cheap A3 last fall and then started grabbing some of the B1G1 deals that Amazon and other places were running. When the ax fell in January, I sat back, took stock and realized that with the money I'd spent on the player and about 20 movies, I'd barely have been able to buy the cheapest BD player. I'm not buying any more HD DVDs (mostly because I have most of the ones I wanted), but I did just order an Xbox 360 add-on for $50 so that I can rip the HD DVDs that I do have. I'll most likely pick up a BD player sometime this fall (Black Friday?), but for the moment, I'm enjoying a ton of great movies for what I don't consider to be a whole lot of money.

The did the math?

[WK2]

> And why are people flocking to buy this decade's Betamax? Simple, they did the math.

What? The summary does a good job of describing why HD-DVD is a good buy, although they have to make up facts to do it, such as pricing a DVD player at $60. However, I think it is more likely that most of the people buying HD-DVD players don't know that it is dead. Never attribute to average people doing math that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

Re:The did the math?

[nfgaida]

I did the math. I picked up the 360 HD attachment for $50. Comes with the xbox remote which costs $20 by itself. Picked up a few cheap HD titles to take advantage of the HDTV. I'm not buying bluray until it is around $100 for the player, and $20 for a disk. (or not at all, since I've had netflix I haven't bought a DVD in years)

I want a Betamax deck.

[urcreepyneighbor]

And why are people flocking to buy this decade's Betamax? Don't know about the rest of the world, but I'd like a Betamax deck (to digitize some old Beta tapes I have).

Save your HD-DVD player! Some loser, twenty years from now, may want it!

Re:I want a Betamax deck.

[zakezuke]

Don't know about the rest of the world, but I'd like a Betamax deck (to digitize some old Beta tapes I have). Beta was slightly less pointless. For a home theater it offered superior sound and video even in long play mode until SVHS & Hi8 came out. Oddly enough, I found beta to be more practical than SVHS or Hi8 as I found there were more people with beta decks than SVHS and Hi8 ones.

I had a Sanyo super beta till it died some years back, and I wish that I recorded more with it, esp music videos on MTV's 120 minutes as VHS was in contrast crap even in LP mode.

Re:I want a Betamax deck.

[1point618]

Well, they can still be had:
http://tinyurl.com/28398p
(link to ebay listing of a Betamax deck)

Alien Quadrilogy FTW

[elrous0]

The Criterion Brazil is great (wish they would re-release it in anamorphic or HD, though). But, for my money, the absolute gold standard of all DVD sets is still the Alien Quadrilogy boxset. It's like God himself came down and designed a DVD set. Nothing else even comes close.

Re:Alien Quadrilogy FTW

[sixsixtysix]

criterion did release a single disc anamorphic version.

I bought a HDDVD Drive and have no regrets

[TAZ6416]

I bought the XBOX add on drive for £90 in January, while it's down to about £35 I got 5 Free HD DVD's thrown in - http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/hd-dvd/default.htm

Since Toshiba pulled the plug I have bought another 7 HD DVD titles at an average price of about £6 each, plus I am a customer of http://www.lovefilm.com/ so I can still rent HD DVD's from them. In the UK, the firesale seems not to have started yet, so I'm currently buying most of my stuff from Australia

I also own one of these - http://www.palsite.com/9300ovi.html so I have a history of backing failed technology ;)

Jonathan

Don't forget...

[pushing-robot]

...The other reason to buy a HD-DVD drive.

John Titor is on his way ...

[Anonymous Coward]

John Titor is on his way back to the present to get a set of HD-DVD players ... Seems the only thing that can save the world from total destruction (in 2035 AD) is a program thats recorded on a HD-DVD ...

700 titles isn't much of a catalog...

[argent]

This isn't anything to do with saving face on a lost cause, it's saving money on movies that you can buy right now. Don't forget, that HD player will still play regular DVDs, so for someone who doesn't have those "GOTTA GET SOME OF THAT" early adopter genes, a choice of 500 cheap titles for a $75 player is a better deal than 700 full price titles for a $320 player.

digital distribution

[dabadab]

Of course, the smart thing would be that ISPs distribute the content themselves, so it does not really cost them in terms of external bandwith. That's exactly what the major ISPs here plan to do with IPTV.

Re:digital distribution

[r_jensen11]

Of course, the smart thing would be that ISPs distribute the content themselves, so it does not really cost them in terms of external bandwith. That's exactly what the major ISPs here plan to do with IPTV. That's great if you're able to use a major ISP. However, what about all of the people using municipal systems? What about watching a movie somewhere that doesn't have an internet connection, like in a vehicle?

Sorry, but physical media is here to stay. Sure, it'll diminish in presense, much like it has for the music industry; but the last time I checked, CD's are still selling heathily.

Personally a part of this phenomenon

[d_jedi]

The value prospect of HD-DVD right now is compelling. Picked up a 360 add-on for $49 - which comes with King Kong and five free* (admittedly, quite limited selection) HD-DVDs.
* + $10 shipping

Then picked up a bunch selling at deepdiscount.com for $10.
Then picked up Planet Earth for $35 (damn Canadian shipping costs - would have been $25 if I lived in the US!).

In all, I've spent maybe $250. That's not enough to even buy a Blu-Ray player.. but it was enough to get me HD player, plus a whole bunch (20)+ of movies..

Worst case scenerio.. in a few years, I have to rip all of these movies to BD. But for now, I feel like I've made out pretty well..

HD-A2 vs. *Quality* Upscalers

[DCheesi]

What all the "Wal-mart DVD players are cheaper" posters are missing is that the upconversion on those players is mostly crap. If you've got an HDTV that has good internal scaling then all you need is progressive-scan; but some displays *need* a good quality upscaler, and the Wal-Mart brands are largely worthless for that (heck, even the models sold in CC/BB are only mediocre, usually).

Personally, I bought an HD-A2 when the price dropped below that of the OPPO players, which are widely considered the cream of the crop in upscaling DVD players. Many reviews on AV discussion boards indicated that the Tosh HD-DVD players were(/are) at least equal to the OPPOs, plus you got HD-DVD as a bonus. Meanwhile the only thing I sacrificed was support for formats like DVD-A/SACD on the OPPO, which I didn't plan to use anyway.

Of course that was before the format "died", so there was at least the *possibility* that the HD-DVD portion would be useful going forward. But if I were looking at it now, I'd much rather have a $60 "HD-A3 than a $30 Wal-mart brand just for the upconverting function...

Fortune

[Relic of the Future]

I think the fortune being displayed at the bottom of the page states the issue better than any of the 100+ comments.

Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it will be dear to you. -- Thomas Jefferson

I was an early adopter...

[PolishPimpin]

and bought a HD-DVD player. In the early going it did seem like HD-DVD would be on top, especially judging by Sonys track record in format wars ie. Betamax and Mini Disc. /.ers seem to forget that the early concensus here also supported HD-DVD, on price alone if not anything else.. I bought mine for $179.99 while a standalone Blue Ray was still just below $1000 (not counting the PS3). A 180 dollars lost isnt bad compared to my cousin who spent 1200 on the LG dual format player about 6 months ago.

HD-DVD player satisfies my current movie needs

[sfalcon1]

I bought an HD-DVD when they went below $150 and see the value the author has seen. It is a great up-converter and is nice to see HD movies on my 56inch 1080p HDTV once and a while. Before I bought the HDDVD player, all the DVD players I owned displayed 480i which looked like crap. With up-converted DVDs I can wait until blu-ray players are below $200. It is fun to watch all of the emotional blu-ray fans try to still squash any mention of HD-DVD. :) They need to smell the coffee and wake up. DVDs aren't going away without a fight unless they pull a microshaft. Has anyone been to a blockbuster lately? I was just in a store today and still only see ONE small section for Blu-ray. It is just not that good of an improvement to justify the cost, right now. Don't be driven by the Hype of the media and the propaganda of corporations. About 50% of the people I know have HDTV's but not one cares that much about HD movies. One guy from my workplace, just bought a new plasma this week, but once he got it home he lost his excitement with the quality. When I asked that if he subscribed to HD service he verified that he did. I See Two Problems With HD Today. 1. Not enough different to justify the large costs. 2. Camera work needs to improve, the camera's or camera operators aren't focusing fast enough! very sloppy. The variances is shots in a movie or TV show is very disrupted and annoying. I do hear a lot of people ordering their DTV coupons! I did and will drop DirecTV in a heartbeat. Movies and Over-the-air HDTV, tired of the crap on Cable/Satellite TV.

Devices Getting crowded

[kramulous]

I agree and would do exactly the same. The problem is, how many units do you have around your tele? I look at mine and see: Digital receiver; original hacked Xbox; Xbox360; Receiver (sound); VCR (yes, I still use it); Clock. This does not include the Ethernet cables to the Linux box stashed in a cupboard as a file server. All require power. Cabling is a mess (but cleverly piled behind cabinets). And now there are going to be HD-DVD and BluRay? Things are getting crowded (unless by stroke of luck I can get an architect in to design my new imaginary house and design a setup for him/her).

Two new units for a technology that may last, what, 5-10 years? When downloaded movies work great and I'm already set up for it.

Re:Devices Getting crowded

[MBGMorden]

My bedroom TV is worse: Hacked Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 HD-DVD Addon, PS2, Gamecube, Dreamcast, Audio Receiver, AV Switchbox, HDMI Switchbox
My living room TV: VCR, DVD, DirecTV, HTPC, Audio Receiver, CD player, AV Switchbox

Also have 2 other TV's in different rooms with DVD players.

On the top two, while the number of set top boxes is getting excessive, I still don't find it that bad. I'm pretty good about adding shelving as needed and keeping my wires straight, and as you can see listed I always use switchboxes and such. Overall I personally as long as it's not growing exponentially or anything, I don't mind a new box here or there.

upscaling and skimming over the details

[Anonymous Coward]

"It can also act as an upscaling DVD player, so in fact you'll get better quality than a standard DVD player"

Uhm. No.

Now let me qualify that... an upscaling DVD player outputs a higher resolution picture to fit your higher resolution display. The quality of that picture can never, by definition, be -better- than that of a standard DVD player. Let me actually adjust that a bit - it can never be better than that from the same DVD player without the upscaling applied. Different DVD players may still have different outputs regardless of that.

Now, granted, a DVD player with an upconverter -may- do a better job at...
- de-interlacing
- resampling (the actual upscaling filter)
- determining what region to scale up
- determining the resolution to scale up to ...than the TV's internal scaler. Then again, if your TV has a kick-ass internal scaler, especially if it's a flatscreen TV and it knows how to use the same tricks that ClearType et al use for an apparent greater resolution, then the upscaling DVD player is actually going to suck compared to the non-upscaling variant.

That said, most TVs employ some of the worst upscaling methods out there, so I can't blame DVD and HDD player manufacturers for adding proper upscaling circuitry (chips), but the blanket statement that an upscaling DVD player gives greater quality than a non-upscaling one is wrong. It may give a better picture.

Mess.

[ari{Dal}]

This entire format war is a mess, and a losing proposition for anyone who wants to upgrade their current DVD player for an HD version.

I recently went and dropped a small fortune on a top of the line 1080p HDTV, but I didn't buy an HD player, blu-ray OR HD-DVD. Why should I, when the offerings are skimpy, the players are either obsolete (hd-dvd and blu-ray profile 1.0) or overly expensive (blu-ray)? And in the case of Blu-Ray, everyone's still half-waiting for profile 2.0 players (other than the PS3) to come on the market for a decent price.

Instead, I bought a cheap upconverting DVD player, and spent $6 at Monoprice.com on a DVI to HDMI cable, and began downloading content from my favourite torrent sites. Most of this stuff I already owned in standard DVD, so I feel zero guilt about downloading it in HD format.

A year or two from now, when the prices have lowered to a reasonable level and the Blu-Ray library contains a nice selection of titles, I will look at buying a player. But for now, I'd rather spend the money on a new HDD.

Don't forget about D-VHS!!!

[hal2008]

I just picked up a JVC D-VHS used for a little over $100... D-VHS plays and records in 1080i so it looks just as good as HD-DVD or Blue-Ray and it cleans up all of my old VHS tapes. There's also a menu system just like DVD's have. I can record (encrypted) HD video and then backup to my pc thanks to the built in firewire port.

Re:Don't forget about D-VHS!!!

[dangitman]

Ugggh. No, let's forget about D-VHS, please!! That's just disturbing.

donuts: the early adopters dilemma

[Riquez]

I could buy this fresh donut now for 100 or I could wait 'till this afternoon when it will be reduced to 50.

It would be nice to enjoy the warm doughy goodness now, but who knows there may be a new choco-chip version out later.

Forget Blu-Ray

[willbry]

Maybe it'll be ready in a few years for mass adoption. Blu-Ray is not now ready for prime time.

I avoided the whole HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray war (http://dvdupconvert.wordpress.com/) and, with Blu-Ray's prices still being sky high with features being limited, I'll keep avoiding Blu-Ray for the near future.

Maybe Sony will pay attention if HD-DVD sales actually increase following its demise.

Re:Forget Blu-Ray

[Enahs]

Amen. No, what will actually happen, because it's already happening, is that the BDA will spin this as being entirely Toshiba and Microsoft's fault for cobbling together a HD disc format and getting it to market years before the BDA was ready, thereby necessitating rushing BD players and titles to market, tarnishing the reputation amongst early adopters, and causing manufacturers to drop player prices to sub-$1000 levels before they were ready to. Then, "HD DVD fanboys" will get the blame for continuing the heinous crime of talking about HD DVD as a reason for Blu-Ray's continued lack of adoption speed. Finally, HD DVD will get the blame for forever tarnishing their monopoly on HD physical media, because early consumer confusion killed it, of course.

Hey, if HD DVD had been coated with the BD hard coating, I think it would have been a 100% no brainer--HD DVD. Who cares that HDi was Microsoft? It's just basically XML and JS mixed together, nothing particularly special. The inclusion of VC-1? Blu-Ray has it too. There are no overwhelming advantages or disadvantages to either format, period. And both types of players play DVDs just fine.

Me, I'm keeping my HD DVD player--bought when it was in Oppo price range, though it's much cheaper now, boo hoo--and will buy a BD player when Profile 2.0 takes off and is affordable. Unfortunately, if too many of us take that stance, it never will take off. Whoops.

Biggest difference between HD DVD and Betamax

[91degrees]

HD-DVD differs from betamax in one important respect - Price! Before the format was confirmed dead you could buy the players for $200. Betamax never went that low. When it still looked viable it was two or three time that in 1980's dollars. In real terms this would be like a $1000+ piece of equipment.

Buying the losing format here just causes a minor inconvenience. Pus aside $20 a week and it will take less than 3 months to save up enough to cover the loss. Anyone who owns an HD DVD should find it pretty easy to cover that.

Also, BR buyers get the shaft as well.

[DaveCBio]

Because BR was rushed to the shelves to compete with HD-DVD they shipped an incomplete spec. They like to call it 1.0, but really for a next generation media format the only think it did better was the video and audio resolution. HD-DVD at least shipped with a complete next gen experience. So, people that bought and will buy stand alone BR players are going to get screwed if they want to play with all the new features on discs unless they buy a PS3 and not everyone wants a curved surface game player with no standard infrared remote in their home theater rack. Not to mention the confusion that will eventually arise as BonusView and BD Live discs start hitting the shelves and people return them because they can't play all the features because they have a 1.0 or 1.1 player. Lastly, prices of BR players are going to stay high for a long while now. Got used to that sub $200 HD-DVD player idea? Not going to happen with BR until next year because apparently they won't license the tech to Chinese companies that could mass produce cheaper BR units. They want to keep it inflated to maximize profit regardless of how it affects the market because there is no competition. As much as I dislike downloading movies because of the lack of extras and decrease in quality, I am hoping digital distribution catches on. This is a format war that was won by the studios because I really don't think the consumer won.

Re:Also, BR buyers get the shaft as well.

[earlymon]

This is a format war that was won by the studios because I really don't think the consumer won. Absolutely correct - but for the part where the studios do not live in the real world, the victory itself isn't real. It's their version of moral victory - had the consumers won, the consumers would be spending more, and the studios would be getting more. Don't ask me how studio distribution thinking works - my wife worked in that industry for years, I've met these people at conventions - they defy anything you would think of as logical.

Strange Justification

[stewbacca]

I've seen some pretty strange attempts at justifying bad purchases in the past, but this article tops them all.

Laserdisc is DEAD

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think digital distribution will be a replacement for physical disks anytime soon.

WTF? Laserdisc is dead, as are all other analog formats. Almost all (more than 99.9%) of the physical disks for sale today, are digital distribution. Talking about digital distribution replacing discs, is like talking about beverages replacing coffee. No matter which side you take (pro or con) it makes you look dumb.