Toshiba Going After Blu-ray?

Swifty Nifty has an adventure submitted a link to a story about Toshiba's new High Def Disc Format. No, I'm not kidding — apparently Blu-ray has a new contender. This seems to be intended as a DVD backwards-compatible format, but there's not a lot of detail.

Comments

Hello?

[Mateo_LeFou]

Could we please get ISO to fast-track one of these High Def standards so we will all know what to buy? Please?? (Hint:joke)

Re:Hello?

[Midnight Thunder]

Could we please get ISO to fast-track one of these High Def standards so we will all know what to buy? Please?? (Hint:joke)

In that can I vote, and then complain about the way I voted? ;)

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . so we will all know what to buy I didn't buy an HD-DVD player. I will not be buying a Blu-Ray player. I will not be buying a this thing. Technology is moving way too fast for me to keep replacing my hardware. As soon as I commit to buying one of these things, a new technology will have emerged, making my spanking new purchase obsolete before the year is out. I am not a sucker.

Fuck this shit. Lemme download an electronic copy to play directly from my hard drive.

Re:Hello?

[Lumpy]

I know your joking bot the death of HD-DVD was a loss for the consumer.

HD-DVD discs were easy to author on home PC so your home movies could be burned to a STANDARD DVD-5 or DVD-9 with the pretty menus and all the glitz.

Blu-Ray has horribly bad and spotty compatability with a hack of putting AVCHD encoded files on a standard DVD-5 disc. Only some players will play it and some that do play stop playing after firmware updates.

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

Technology is moving way too fast for me to keep replacing my hardware. As soon as I commit to buying one of these things, a new technology will have emerged, making my spanking new purchase obsolete before the year is out. I am not a sucker.

Fuck this shit. Lemme download an electronic copy to play directly from my hard drive. Hard drive? That's obsolete. Everyone's using solid state these days.

Re:Hello?

[Dishevel]

In that can I vote, and then complain about the way I voted? ;) I thought that it was mandatory.

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard drive? That's obsolete. Everyone's using solid state these days. Hardly, although, they eventually will be obsolete when the price of solid state drives becomes reasonable.

Seeing how I already have a few HDD's, I may as well continue to use them as long as 1) they still function and 2) speed is not a major issue.

Re:Hello?

[Theoboley]

"Millions ask why?" Apparently Toshiba didn't learn their lesson from getting their proverbial asses handed to them on the HD Platter... They feel that they owe it to their stockholders to have their stocks plummet even lower lol. Nice in theory, but so was HDDVD...we all know how that ended

Re:Hello?

[terjeber]

Blu-Ray has horribly bad and spotty compatability with a hack of putting AVCHD encoded files on a standard DVD-5 disc

And you have tried this? I have authored AVCHD disks for about 4 months now, and my experience is directly opposite of what you are saying. I regularly take authored disks to various places like Circ City and Best Buy to test on a variety of Blu-Ray players, and I have not had a single player not play my menu-based AVCHD disk yet.

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

"HD DVD discs were easy to author". That is pure crap. Whatta hell burning a DVD with HD content has to do with HD DVD ?!??

THERE WERE NO HD DVD discs to author because there were no working burners available ! HD DVD was complete failure when it comes to burnable disk, format simply did not work.

Sama time there were literally countless BD-R and BD-RE drives available. And nowdays BD-drive prices are constantly going down and even more drives are available (with faster read/write speeds).

Re:Hello?

[skuzzlebutt]

Solid state? Pshaw...My Neuro-Optical-Quantum PC knew you were going to type that before you even logged in this morning.

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

I regularly take authored disks to various places like Circ City and Best Buy to test on a variety of Blu-Ray players lies.

Re:Hello?

[gravis777]

Adobe Encore easily made Menus for BluRay discs. In fact, I could take my DVD menus, with HD content, and compile the same thing to either BluRay or DVD, and it just reencoded the disc for whichever format I needed

Nero easily recorded AVC files to DVD5 and DVD9, and played flawlessly on my PS3. Source was a PAL TS file that I converted to NTSC AVC. No issues whatsoever.

I have yet to see any software that would allow me to author HD-DVD. As I have both formats, I would love to see something that would let me make HD-DVD compatable discs as easily as I can make BluRay compatable discs.

Re:Hello?

[Achromatic1978]

I didn't buy an HD-DVD player. I will not be buying a Blu-Ray player. I will not be buying a this thing. Technology is moving way too fast for me to keep replacing my hardware.

And what, it's your belief that technology is only going to slow down from here?

Re:Hello?

[SuperKendall]

You regular take your discs to "Circ City and Best Buy" and play them?

I would if I were testing something new like Blu-ray burning. After all, you cannot logically buy all the players on the market (or at least it would be somewhat expensive).

3: So they let you pop in a random disc into a player to see if it works?

You have never taken a reference DVD or CD of your own into a store to try out equipment before you buy?

If so, you are an idiot. Or at least someone too ignorant to be talking about what Blu-Ray can or cannot do.

Store employees don't give a fig what discs you put in for your own trials, and generally encourage it in fact since it may lead to a sale. It's how I've bought audio/video equipment for decades! With CD's I brought in my own burned discs to have a variety of material, and I'd do the same for DVD's if I was testing video in a store.

The only exception would obviously be porn, then they'd probably stop you right quick.

Re:Hello?

[Hal_Porter]

Bullshit.
You regular take your discs to "Circ City and Best Buy" and play them?

1: If you're looking for a new player, what's stopping you from buying one? According to you, they ALL work.

2: Why is this a "regular" activity for you? Are you worried that the display model will have it's firmware upgraded and the compatibility might be shot to shit? I know I hate having to wait for the cock jockeys in red/blue + khaki to finish the firmware updates on the display models. I go in to experience true HD and I end up waiting!

3: So they let you pop in a random disc into a player to see if it works? Gee, could that purple disc you sloppily labeled with a Sharpie be a pirated copy of something? Porn perhaps? Sure, go ahead and pop it in - we'll display it on this 60" plasma over here, with the 7.1 system that 8 year old just cranked up to 11. Oh, what's that? You have a disk? Well those don't typically fit in these players, but let's try it anyway. I dunno, even if it were true the GP would still be fairly average on the autism spectrum for this site. Over at kuro5hin he'd actually be too normal.

Re:Hello?

[terjeber]

You regular take your discs to "Circ City and Best Buy" and play them?

Yes, I do. I do it for two reasons. None of them because I need a new Blu-Ray player. Let me explain.

I own a HD camcorder, and I use this to shoot at birthday parties and other family events. Often people ask me about the quality of HD camcorders (not about TVs and players). They wonder if they will actually get good quality. I like shooting and editing, and to show friends and acquaintances what the result can be, I have so far this year created AVCHD disks to show them. They ask me to assist in purchasing a camcorder, and we drop in to a store and talk. That's when they see the AVCHD disk. I have also handed out some disks, but people are interestingly a little shy about asking for permission to view at Circuit City or Best Buy, even though I tell them it has never been an issue for me to get permission.

BTW, this will change in the middle of this month since SCS is releasing their Blu-Ray authoring tool then to match my new Blu-Ray writer.

So they let you pop in a random disc into a player to see if it works?

I always ask nicely and I have so far not received a single negative answer. The closest I have gotten to that was a "You have to ask that other dude". This is also the experience from anyone I have chatted with in the video editing forums I frequent, so I am unsure as to why you think it impossible. Have you tried it and been denied?

If you go back about 12 months and read some of the video editing forums like creativecow or others you will find many curious "editors" doing exactly the same thing.

Just curious about your attitude though. Did I tear down some religious symbol you have been worshiping?

Re:Hello?

[gravis777]

Just to note - If you have issues with Nero converting the files for you, you can always use Canopus Procoder for the converting. Just convert whatever you want to put on a BD disc to Mpeg2 and Nero knows what to do from there.

Also, has anyone found an easy way to do surround sound? I find it annoying that when I convert a DD5.1 TS stream to anything else, it always downmixes the audio to 2 channel. I have tried tons of different conversion software, all with the same effect - 2 channel low-res DVD audio.

Re:Hello?

[Fred_A]

Hard drive? That's obsolete. Everyone's using solid state these days. Solid state is so passé... wait a few month before new high density tapes come out and they'll be all the rage.

Data storage on Betamax is the future, that's what insiders at a big company told me. But I've said too much already.

Re:Hello?

[Tumbleweed]

In that can I vote, and then complain about the way I voted?

Don't blame me, I voted for HD-Kodos.

Re:Hello?

[Inglix the Mad]

LOL well I don't know what Toshiba's trying to pull. Retail establishments won't like them too much (see: gift cards, et al, to placate HD-DVD buyers)

Toshiba's got to think too: DVD 2.0? Super Up-Conversion?

Compatibility issues, being sandwiched between the 75$ up-convert regular DVD player and the likely 250$ Blu-ray player. These conditions alone will not be enviable.

I don't know if this is really a smart business decision for Toshiba, time will tell. Personally I think they're f**ked on this initiative.

Re:Hello?

[hostyle]

Logged in? Pschaw. I shall report your epic fail to my master when he returns from a round of golf.

Warning: You may be berated with some of yesterdays human slang when he returns.

regards,
    the hostyle bot

Re:Hello?

[hostyle]

your to anal bi halef

Re:Hello?

[DrXym]

You can burn a Blu Ray compatible disk format onto DVD. The so-called BD9 will play just like a Blu Ray disc but with less space.

I'm sure there are compatibility issues with some players. Buy a player which doesn't have those issues and make your feelings known.

Re:Hello?

[Tumbleweed]

Hard drive? That's obsolete. Everyone's using solid state these days.

Maybe you guys need a refresher course. It's all ball bearings nowadays.

Re:Hello?

[Tumbleweed]

I know your joking bot the death of HD-DVD was a loss for the consumer.

I disagree - I think the big war between HD-DVD and BluRay was a win for the consumer - it delayed everything long enough that the industry is moving to downloads instead of physical media. BluRay will not take over for DVD - downloads will.

Re:Hello?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Keep in mind that early DVD players had compatibility problems, and even three or four years after the format release there were still an occasional bug in players that needed to be fixed.

You mentioned some players had compatibility problems with AVCHD discs, did most of them happen to be Samsung? Except for Samsung players, Blu-Ray players are doing pretty well as far as compatibility issues.

It's easy to make HD DVD compatible because pretty much only one company designed the players, all the others were either using Toshiba's reference designs or were rebadged Toshiba players.

Re:Hello?

[drsquare]

I doubt it, the bandwidth and hard disk capacity isn't there. Most people could only get one or two HD films on their hard disk before they ran out of space, and they'd take days to download on most broadband connections.

Re:Hello?

[Tumbleweed]

You can pretty easily compress most movies to 700MB with the right codec, maybe double that for HD, and most people wouldn't know the difference. Most people don't have HDTVs, and most of those don't have 1080p capability either. Also, most people never seem to check out the extras on discs, either (which is *really* strange to me). Considering the state of the economy, I think people will be more open to things which cost less, and no physical media scales to lower costs a lot easier, especially considering all the marketing, packaging, display, transportation costs involved in BluRay, not to mention the cost of the players right now (though that'll obviously come down soon enough). BluRay *really* needs some sub-$100 Korean players on the market, plus they need to chop the price of the discs in half to actually compete with DVD. The problem with all of that though is that most people still can't see anything better than DVD resolution anyway.

Re:Hello?

[HyperQuantum]

Hard drive? That's obsolete. Everyone's using solid state these days. So what? The file formats stay the same, compatibility is 100%. But Blu-Ray and its competitors, that's a completely different story.

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

Truth is, I've never once watched a DVD and said to myself "boy this looks like crap, oh I know why don't I buy new hardware and spend three times as much for media that's only marginally better." It just hasn't happened. The tech may be cool, but we are just not ready for it. DVDs are here to stay for at least 10 more years.

Re:Hello?

[LordSnooty]

I totally agree that physical media is on the way out, but who exactly would want an HD movie if they didn't have a HD TV? We're still a few years away from eliminating the discs. Plus, I see the studios looking at the state of the music industry, and thinking that the last thing they want to is remove the notion of 'value' that physical media brings. Consumers will lead the change, but we've a bit to go yet.

Re:Hello?

[yo_tuco]

"You can burn a Blu Ray compatible disk format onto DVD.... I'm sure there are compatibility issues with some players."

I believe your DVD player must be able to handle bit rate of 15Mbps for this to happen. The DVD standard bit rate is max 9Mbps with average typically around 7.5Mbps.

Re:Hello?

[Lumpy]

I have yet to see any software that would allow me to author HD-DVD. As I have both formats, I would love to see something that would let me make HD-DVD compatable discs as easily as I can make BluRay compatable discs.

final cut pro suite allowed this for quite a while now.

Re:Hello?

[Tumbleweed]

We're still a few years away from eliminating the discs.

I agree, but what that means in practical terms is that DVD is still the disc to beat. DVD will be around long after BD, cuz BD is going nowhere fast.

It's too bad noone really came out with affordable 480p widescreen TVs - most people never saw what DVD was really capable of before HDTV came out. And really, a large-ish 720p set with source upconverted from DVD is a pretty nice picture, and way more affordable than HD source and 1080 display. The US economy is going to prevent a lot of upgrades, though, so I think DVD is going to be 'the' disc for a few more years, yet, until better more people have true broadband connections, and the infrastructure is upgraded to *feed* those broadband connections. Too many people are paying the cost of a new BD player every month on gas right now to afford new electronic toys.

Re:Hello?

[gangien]

well, with a bit more government regulation..

Re:Hello?

[hairyfeet]

I have to agree. And until they can come out with a burner that isn't crippled with DRM with media that is even close to being as affordable as DVD so I can backup and hand out software without needing to worry about getting it back I'll also have to pass. I personally am hoping that those hologram discs will become affordable,as have 1Tb or more in a hard to damage cartridge makes for a VERY appealing backup solution. Until then I'll stick with DVD. but that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Hello?

[zippthorne]

No way, moon-bounce delay line memory is where it's at.

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not, but like many consumers, he will be getting every say... third upgrade or something, depending on how fast the 'new version' comes out. The old version will likely do well enough for many people until they're straight-out required to upgrade.

It's not like every American has upgrading their operating system with every iteration of Windows either. I don't know a single person who's actually installed and used every version of Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Vista.

Re:Hello?

[sexconker]

So you burn some hd discs and then you hang out at circuit city and best buy to offer advice on cam corders and pass out your samples?

I don't get the point of it.

If someone asks you for help in purchasing a camcorder, "dropping into a store" is one of the last things you should do.

In a discussion of compatibility, I don't see a point in what you're doing.
If you're showing off a camcorder and the quality it produces, I still don't see the need to drop into stores and use their displays. You own the actual camera in question, and almost certainly a capable player+tv / PC of your own.

Re:Hello?

[drsquare]

You can pretty easily compress most movies to 700MB with the right codec, maybe double that for HD, and most people wouldn't know the difference. Most people don't have HDTVs,

People without HDTVs won't be interested in blu-ray or HDDVD at all, so why even bring them up? You may as well say that DVDs have no future because most people in the world don't have TVs at all.

If you think a 700MB CD of a film compares to a Blu-ray on a HDTV, then you must be fucking blind.

Re:Hello?

[LordVader717]

This isn't about storage, but about a way of distributing movies. Thing is, we didn't really need the capacity increase by Bluray, but Sony saw it as a way of pushing DRM, preventing Piracy and just making the balance of power sway their way.

If Toshiba can seriously pull this one off, I'd congratulate them fully. I hope they ditch the Region lock, like with HDDVD.

Re:Hello?

[Skrapion]

Yeah, actually, technological advancements slow down all the time. Look at CPU speeds, or space exploration. The future in 2001: A Space Odyssey wouldn't have been too far off if our advancements in the field never slowed down.

Re:Hello?

[kesuki]

"And what, it's your belief that technology is only going to slow down from here?"

I've heard that some people believe the price of gasoline will go up around a dollar every year because of the post peak problem. if energy prices do go up, then technology, which depends on energy, and the availability of cheap energy will slow down. it takes a lot of money to 'research' new technologies, using technology already researched is cheap. for an example, consider modern CPU pricing, multi-core designed processors have allowed cpu vendors to rely on the same basic die technology for their cores, even while following moore's law. this is why a high end quad core costs only $400 while long ago far away in the past a 'brand spanking new' 1 ghz chip cost over $1,200. designing new chips has been hit or miss, the itanium is a perfect example of how redesigning something, doesn't always create a viable product.

the point being, if energy prices go up and up, people will have less disposable income, making technology higher and higher risk. making existing technology work better will always be cheaper and safer, than designing new technology.

to keep energy costs lower(and thus keep technology moving at a rapid pace), there are 3 solutions i can think of, off hand.

1. Under Sea Drilling platforms off both arctic and antarctic coasts (under sea so they don't break when the ice forms every winter) the cons are, that nobody (that i know of) has a working undersea drilling platform that is practical. you could go with a telescoping design only producing oil in summer months, or have undersea pipelines to beyond the icy region where tankers can fill up so the 'undersea platforms' can produce year round, underneath the sea.. and possibly a few ideas i haven't though of, the problem with this is it's still dependence on fossil fuels, and putting more co2 into the environment is the last thing we need to be doing.

2. bio-fuels could start taking up the slack, this is really only feasible if large scale bio-fuel from algae is started, and so far at least one texas energy company is starting a major bio-fuel from algae product cycle. How that company does, might drastically change the face of bio-fuel as an alternative to fossil fuels, if they're successful and profitable.

3. use less energy. it's simple, just push aside the American car safety standards, so vehicles can be lighter, and use cheaper engines, and mandate fuel efficiency. sure, a lighter car is a death trap if you hit a big truck, or a heavy car, but if all the cars on the road have to meet higher fuel economy targets (like they have to in japan and china) then they're only more dangerous when hitting old 'legacy' vehicles.

you can easily design an ultralight car that would get well over 120 mpg(without being a hybrid) these guys did. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/10/loremo_lives_su.php

i don't know how the car does for safety, in crashes. in general, concept cars that get over 120 mpg tend to be labeled as 'death traps' in a crash with conventional cars, and some use expensive technology that will never scale to the mass market.

cars aren't the only place where we can save energy, but they are a big one, if we'd just say cars can be a lot lighter, even if they're not as safe, just to get better fuel economy. when i owned cars i owned the kind that would have been fatal in any highway collision, yet the type of car accidents i did have, were generally ones involving only me, with 3 exceptions (1 was completely not my fault) and the 3 i did have were at city speeds, not highway.

the point is we could stop the rise in gasoline prices, just by pushing fuel economy.

Re:Hello?

[Firethorn]

If you think a 700MB CD of a film compares to a Blu-ray on a HDTV, then you must be fucking blind.

Naw, for blu-ray he was proposing double that, or 1.4 GB. For an hour and a halfish film, using an *advanced* codec that compresses stuff enough that you actually need a fairly grunty chip* to process it for display, I can see it.

Consider the success of MP3 over CD and non-lossy codecs for music.

Only a fraction of the population actually cares that much about quality over convenience.

Yes, there'll be artifacts. AS for bandwidth, I'll point out that fiber and 10mbit data connections are going into more and more homes, heck you can get 10mbit dsl, and a good cable connection can be even faster. As is, I can easily queue a 4GB movie in the morning and watch it when I get home with my current connection, or three if I do it the night before. Combine with a terabyte HD, I can have a 200 movie 'favorite collection' at the constant ready and 50 'swap slots' for occasional viewing/one off movies.

4GB for a 2 hour movie shouldn't have artifacting that's really visible at a good viewing distance and a viewer not looking for them.

*Any mainline computer CPU today shouldn't strain with it, but I can see it being too much for, say, a iPOD's chip.

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what, it's your belief that technology is only going to slow down from here? No, and most obviously, that is nowhere near what I said. I specifically am talking about needing specialized equipment to read specialized media types. Don't tell me you couldn't figure that out. And more importantly, don't insinuate what I didn't imply.

How many people RTFS and thought to themselves "wow, I'm glad I didn't rush out and buy a blu-ray player"?

As far as I can see in the future, I will always have a need for storage space on my computer. So just gimme an electronic copy and I'll store it on my myth-tv box. A program can always be written to play it. On the HDD, it's all just ones and zeroes, regardless of the source.

Over the past twenty years, I've amassed quite a collection of CD's/DVD's. Once HD-DVD/Blu-Ray hit the market, I stopped buying them. M$'s already got enough of my money with their "upgrade treadmill" (why I moved to Linux), and I'm not about to do the same shit with my CD/DVD collection. Since the days of vinyl, I've purchased (and wore out) and repurchased (on cassette and wore out again) and repurchased (on CD). I now have close to 1,000 CD's now and several dozen DVD's. How many times do I have to give the same company money for the right to listen to the same music just because the format shifted, or there is a remastered version, or the gold disc version, or there is an SACD version or a "greatest hits" album with 2 additional previously unreleased tracks? Fuck that.

From now on, all my music/movies will be obtained via rent 'n' rip, sneakernet and, yes, torrented. Enough with the **AA's printing free money. We've discovered a faster, cheaper distribution model. There is still money to be made by promoting bands and taking a cut of their touring income, if the bands aren't creative/brave enough to do it on the merit of their music alone. And enough of this shit with movie-stars, like Jim Carrey, getting paid $20M to make a shit movie like Cable Guy. Let's let the market forces determine what these actors are truly worth. And don't worry, the good musicians/actors will still be able to make a pretty fucking good living. It's the mediocre ones that will flounder in obscurity, but then again, that's the way it's always been. Maybe they shouldn't be counting on it as their main source of income.

Now that I've turned this into a complete copyright rant, where did I say that I wasn't going to replace my motherboard every 5-10 years? The laptop I am currently using is at least 8 years old and it reads the same ones and zeros as my 2 year old desktop. I'll eventually have to bite the bullet and upgrade it when it dies, but I'll be much less concerned about its replacement being obsolete the following year, because I know it will still recognize two things: the number one and the number zero.

Look, I'm not trying to be an asshole but, where do you get this impression I am stupid enough to think that technology is going to be slowing down any time soon?

Re:Hello?

[halfelven]

what software do you use to author AVCHD?

Re:Hello?

[terjeber]

So you burn some hd discs and then you hang out at circuit city and best buy to offer advice on cam corders and pass out your samples?

I don't get the point of it.

Well, since you apparently can not read, what you get and do not get is of little consequence.

You own the actual camera in question, and almost certainly a capable player+tv / PC of your own

Yes I do, and when I have friends who are looking for advice on a buying decision for a camcorder, coming to my house is not the particular sensible, they go where they can actually convert the buying decision into an actual product. Is that so hard to understand?

If you were going to assist a friend in buying a camcorder, a TV or a sound system, where would you go? Farmers Market?

Re:Hello?

[terjeber]

Currently I use Uled DVD Movie Factory with the HD pack. I am waiting for SCS to release DVD Architect in a couple of weeks with Blu-Ray authoring capabilities.

Re:Hello?

[kesuki]

"BTW, this will change in the middle of this month since SCS is releasing their Blu-Ray authoring tool then to match my new Blu-Ray writer."

Just out of curiosity, will this SCS tool, allow you to put AVC (mpeg-4 ver10) on Blu-ray discs?

If it Does, i can understand why you'd want to switch from DVDs to Blu-ray, even though burnable Blu-ray media is still sky high. i mean $60 for a 5 pack, compared to 50 dvd-+r for anywhere from $15-30(depending on where and what grade media you buy) you're effectively quadrupling(or octupling*) the price of storing your movie, with the advantage of holding 5 times the data on 1 disc. DVD-9 discs are a lot cheaper, although they burn at 2.4x speed (at least the ones I've used did! 2.4x speed, that's crazy long an hour for 9gb of data) and 2.7 dvd9 discs store as much as a BD-r 25 gb... BD-50 media cost an astounding $35 A disc, for about 5 times the capacity of a dvd-9.. then again, if wiki is correct, AVC gives you about 6 minutes per GB**. 300 minutes might be worth the $35 if you don't make many home movies that long without charging for it (eg: professional HD wedding recording, and mastering, if it costs $1,200 for the camera, and $1000 for the computer, and $35 for the media, you can still profit easily by charging $1,000 or more per wedding, plus $50 per copy they want on Blu-ray 50, and offer price points etc based on the media used etc)

I can't wait to actually play around with Blu-ray content... but the fact that the discs can use mpeg-2, av-1 or avc, complicates the matter greatly.

*= this was not in my firefox dictionary running ff-3.0b5 on Ubuntu 8.04 lts

**= wiki said this was for full HD, but they also used 1080i, which isn't full hd, only 1080p is full hd, so confusing.

Re:Hello?

[HTH NE1]

final cut pro suite allowed this for quite a while now. Indeed, Final Cut Studio 2 (specifically the DVD Studio Pro application) has HD DVD mastering support. Interesting that, as Apple was backing Blu-Ray.

Apple's DVD Player software was also the first software included with an operating system (Leopard) that supported playing high definition disks (HD DVDs provided they were mastered with the aforementioned software, not commercial disks).

I however have been disappointed with the time it takes Compressor to encode HD video on a 4-core Mac Pro (24 hours for 24 minutes is too slow) and the inability to have two H.264 clips in a single Sequence in Final Cut Pro. I had to abandon my first attempt at making a 3x DVD (HD DVD content on a DVD to be played back at 3x speeds to satisfy the data rate; comparable to the BD9 and BD5 formats on dual-layer and single-layer DVD media respectively) due to the time it took.

I have in the past recorded short-subject DVD-format content onto CD-ROM media, but with player compatibility problems. I wonder about how much HD DVD or Blu-Ray content recorded on CD-ROM media.

I have also thought about replacing the DVD drive in a standalone player with a swappable hard drive bay and formatting a big disk as a really big DVD containing an entire TV series, just to see if the player would treat it as such.

Re:Hello?

[pclminion]

When I was in elementary school my class tried a delay-line storage experiment. We all sat in a circle, and one kid whispered something into the next kid's ear, who repeated it to the next kid, and so on, until it reached the starting point after about two minutes. Oddly, the message seemed to be completely different after making the circle... Maybe we should have used a redundancy code.

Re:Hello?

[terjeber]

Just out of curiosity, will this SCS tool, allow you to put AVC (mpeg-4 ver10) on Blu-ray discs?

This remains to be seen, but I'd be massively surprised if it didn't, to put it mildly. As for the cost, I am aware of this but given the current trend, I assume this will change dramatically over the next 6-12 months.

As for complicated matters - indeed. Given that I shoot in HDV, I am expecting MPEG-2 to be available, otherwise I'd be pissed. Also I am expecting AVC and VC-1 to be available, possibly without the tool actually doing the VC-1 encoding. It should at least accept a VC-1 source. You can then use the Microsoft tools to encode to VC-1.

Re:Hello?

[halfelven]

any way to do lossless (no video reencoding) authoring with that? source is camcorder-generated AVCHD (Canon HF100), destination is either BD9 (BD files on DVD support) or AVCHD disk.

Re:Hello?

[glitch23]

I didn't buy an HD-DVD player. I will not be buying a Blu-Ray player. I will not be buying a this thing. Technology is moving way too fast for me to keep replacing my hardware. As soon as I commit to buying one of these things, a new technology will have emerged, making my spanking new purchase obsolete before the year is out. I am not a sucker.

What you have is only obsolete if you want to make it obsolete by always buying the next thing (which may or may not be the best). The same issue occurs with CPUs. You can't buy every single generation of CPU. I usually skip a generation because I don't need every generation nor do I want to spend the money. I don't consider the next generation to make my current generation obsolete unless I have a reason to need that next generation. This is the nature of technology. We are making leaps and bounds. As someone already asked, do you actually think the situation is going to get better? Taken as a whole, the last decade has seen so much innovation in varous fields of research and development compared to the last century that it is mind boggling. Innovation will only continue to speed up from here.

Re:Hello?

[Das Modell]

I didn't buy an HD-DVD player. I will not be buying a Blu-Ray player. I will not be buying a this thing. Technology is moving way too fast for me to keep replacing my hardware. As soon as I commit to buying one of these things, a new technology will have emerged, making my spanking new purchase obsolete before the year is out. I am not a sucker.

I think I started watching DVDs in 2001 or so, and it'll likely be a year or two before I'll buy a Blu-ray drive. Gosh, technology sure moves fast.

I'm assuming you never bought a DVD drive or player either. Surely you must have foreseen that DVDs would eventually be replaced?

Re:Hello?

[Das Modell]

By downloading you mean going to a site, downloading a movie and watching it on your PC? Doesn't sound like something the average consumer is interested in.

Re:Hello?

[Tumbleweed]

By downloading you mean going to a site, downloading a movie and watching it on your PC? Doesn't sound like something the average consumer is interested in.

I was thinking more along the lines of things like AppleTV or the Netflix Roku.

Re:Hello?

[mattack2]

Umm, yeah, the common kid's game:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

(Maybe I'm "whoosh-ing" your joke.)

Re:Hello?

[sexconker]

I would go to the internet and buy the item for less.

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

where do you get this impression I am stupid enough to think that technology is going to be slowing down any time soon?

From this:

As soon as I commit to buying one of these things, a new technology will have emerged, making my spanking new purchase obsolete before the year is out.

That kind of hyperbole is the exclusive domain of the abysmally stupid.

Re:Hello?

[mattack2]

Umm, you don't *have* to throw out the American car safety standards. The Geo Metro got 49 mpg (according to wikipedia), and that was on the old milage rating.

The smart fortwo gets 40/33, on the new ratings. The Prius gets 44 mpg average, according to the EPA, and it's not a microcar (which actually makes me wonder why there isn't a hybrid smart car in the US).

Re:Hello?

[mattack2]

I would agree with you that for most people, if they don't have a HDTV, they wouldn't be interested in Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD. However, I could see someone who got a PS3 be interested in Blu-Ray to play with it, or for features on movies that aren't on the regular DVD versions. (I'm not sure if the better picture is noticeable on a standard TV.) It's also somewhat future-proofing (at least for Blu-Ray). If one currently has a PS3 and wants to buy "DVDs" of some format, if they think they will eventually get a HDTV, then getting Blu-Ray format discs could make sense for some people.

For example, I don't have a HDTV yet, but I do have a S3 & TivoHD, because of lifetime service transfer offers. I got them because at the time it seemed like lifetime subscriptions were completely gone. (They're back now, though the are now twice the price they used to be.)

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried Nero 8?

Re:Hello?

[terjeber]

Ulead currently re-encodes anything at above 15 Mb/s video. If the AVCHD from the HF100 is at or below 15 Mb/s, it should not be re-encoded.

Re:Hello?

[terjeber]

Good answer. Go away. You are just sad.

Re:Hello?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I totally agree that physical media is on the way out, but who exactly would want an HD movie if they didn't have a HD TV? People who have a computer monitor. It's hard to buy a new computer with a resolution that isn't at least a little bit more than standard definition. I'm operating under the assumption that scaling down looks better than scaling up.

Granted, most people like to watch movies on their TVs anyway. But the kind of people who would watch anything other than YouTube on a computer are also the kind of people I'd expect to either have an HDTV, or have a setup where they can comfortably watch a computer monitor.

Re:Hello?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Naw, for blu-ray he was proposing double that, or 1.4 GB. For an hour and a halfish film, using an *advanced* codec that compresses stuff enough that you actually need a fairly grunty chip* to process it for display, I can see it. The most I've seen them compressed is to DVD-5 size. This makes sense, as it would be easier to burn to a DVD-5 as a Blu-Ray disc (or whatever they call their DVD-5-compatible mode), and it still looks pretty good at 720p.

However...

AS for bandwidth, I'll point out that fiber and 10mbit data connections are going into more and more homes Well, if I remember right, the max speed for Blu-Ray is 48 mbits, maximum. I have 100 mbit fiber going into my home. Granted, it may not always get that fast, and it's nice to not suck down all the bandwidth, but I bet you can compress it down to 20 mbits and still work well.

The trouble is likely going to be the bandwidth at the other end, although I can see that being resolved in time.

Re:Hello?

[RealGrouchy]

Just curious about your attitude though. Did I tear down some religious symbol you have been worshiping? Consumerism. The idea that everything must be quid-pro-quo.

I think GP is not used to (a) someone going into a store to do anything other than purchasing something, and (b) the store representatives letting someone do something in their store that doesn't increase their bottom line.

- RG>

Re:Hello?

[Paiev]

2. bio-fuels could start taking up the slack, this is really only feasible if large scale bio-fuel from algae is started, and so far at least one texas energy company is starting a major bio-fuel from algae product cycle. How that company does, might drastically change the face of bio-fuel as an alternative to fossil fuels, if they're successful and profitable. Erm, not really. If we're talking about other energy sources, natural gas, hyrdogen (fuel cell cars), and wind power are where it's at. Biofuels are overrated. Before you say that running on any of these isn't going to happen, in Iceland you can already find filling stations for a fuel car (and, of course, fuel cell cars themselves).

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for Best Buys HT dept between September 2006 and January of this year and had numerous requests to hook up bluray players to a TV someone is going to buy so they can play their home movies. Granted I work in what is called a Buzz Store(Younger shoppers with disposable income who like to try stuff out) so asking this was not out of the norm. If you asked at a store geared toward some other class of client the answer may be different. Hell once I had one guy buy a HDTV simply because he wanted to be able to make and record HD Porn.

Re:Hello?

[aqk]

Pshaw! Nonsense, my good fellow!

I have recently seen new 8-track (remember Lear's old Mobius strip?) recording that when digitally encoded, can carry up to 412 Terabytes of info!
At blazingly fast loops! AND-
it is backward compatible with the old 8-track loop! And even AVI, WMV and MP4a stuff.
DVD (incl. Blu-ray) is finished!

Re:Hello?

[Firethorn]

The trouble is likely going to be the bandwidth at the other end, although I can see that being resolved in time.

Probably the best answer, though a pain in the butt one, is to pay the various ISPs to have them host a media server in their data server so you can get a nice 10GBit data connection or something. The client connects to the authentication server, once it's account has been authorized and found to have permission to download the movie*, it's referred to the closest media center, preferably one sitting down at your ISP so it's not hogging bandwidth.

If you want to get tricky, make the clients network aware so they'll share with each other if possible, assuming the ISP server doesn't exist, doesn't have the video, or is busy before going all the way back to the central servers Ala bittorrent. Better answer, though it'd make 'copy protection' and watermarking more problematic(Note: I'm not in favor of CP; I'm just being aware that the studios will demand it).

Bonus for movie service - better service for the customers
Bonus for the ISPs - they can oversell their external bandwidth more without pissing off their customers
If the ISP is smart - they'll offer a cut rate for the access to their data center

*Yes, it's okay to charge for the movies.

Re:Hello?

[stewbacca]

A LOSS for the consumer? Are you serious? Not until the damned thing died did I buy a Blu-ray player.

HD-DVD discs were easy to author on home PC so your home movies could be burned to a STANDARD DVD-5 or DVD-9 with the pretty menus and all the glitz. Yeah, and with a $1000 Macintosh, iMovie HD does the same thing with standard dvd discs. I don't understand what HD-DVD has to do with that at all...I guess you can fit MORE of your home movies?

Re:Hello?

[Dal Platinum]

Maybe they encrypted it half way round..

Re:Hello?

[stewbacca]

An idiot? Because I don't take my (non-existent) reference disk in? That's pretty pretentious in my book. Granted, ALL the displays at big box stores suck, because they are connected to the same crappy source, so you can't get a good comparison anyways. Plus, I don't think I've actually seen Blu-ray players hooked up to the better hd tvs at those kind of places anyway.

Re:Hello?

[sexconker]

lolololol

Re:Hello?

[OwnedByTwoCats]

I didn't buy a DVD player. But that didn't stop DVDs from making LaserDisc obsolete. No new material in the format => format is obsolete.

No new software for 68000 Macs => platform is obsolete.
Little new software for PPC Macs => platform is becoming obsolete.
No new software for Windows 98 => platform is obsolete.

What you have is obsolete when everyone else has moved on. Yes, you can nurse it along with old software doing old functions. But when you can't do new stuff, then you're obsolete.

Re:Hello?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Probably the best answer, though a pain in the butt one, is to pay the various ISPs to have them host a media server in their data server so you can get a nice 10GBit data connection or something. This is called a CDN. Doesn't have to be directly at the ISP, just sufficiently distributed as to avoid bottlenecks.

Another way is to use something like Amazon S3 -- bandwidth is 17 cents per gig and falling.

If you want to get tricky, make the clients network aware so they'll share with each other if possible, assuming the ISP server doesn't exist, doesn't have the video, or is busy before going all the way back to the central servers Ala bittorrent. This is pretty much called BitTorrent. It is possible to get a client which will use zeroconf to detect peers on the same subnet, and there's also a feature called Distributed Hash Table. You still need an initial connection to a tracker, but once that's done, you can get additional peers without connecting.

Still, tracker bandwidth shouldn't be an issue, and you really want to be seeding fast anyway -- and again, Amazon S3 will do that.

Of course, the real solution is multicast, at least for the more popular stuff. If multicast had been better supported, BitTorrent would never have been invented, or it would look very different.

Bonus for the ISPs - they can oversell their external bandwidth more without pissing off their customers Actually, it just means they'd piss off a smaller subset. Not everyone wants bandwidth solely for movies.

Re:Hello?

[kesuki]

the smart fotwo uses the same engine, and thus gets the about the same efficiency as the geo metro. the suzuki swift used a 1.3 liter engine, so got slightly worse, I've only owned metros and swifts, never any other kind of car, and their real highway was around 42 and 39 respectively, their real city was around 37-38 but i was notorious for not using breaks for lights/stop signs, and that changes city mileage greatly. (i would take the engine out of gear, half a block before a red light or a stop sign, if i needed to stop i would in the last 20 feet.) the rolling stop is illegal, but i did it anyways.

the point was if you throw out safety standards you can get 100 mpg. there is room in-between, but to really drop energy usage, you have to go full bore, because the number of countries that drive vehicles are increasing as Asian nations becomes wealthier.

Re:Hello?

[kesuki]

fuel cells aren't wide scale practical, the energy that goes into building them, the precious metals needed to get fuel economy... yeah Iceland and Sweden might be able to switch to a hydrogen economy, but america, china, india, japan... there aren't enough of the metals used in fuel cells to make fuel cell cars for all the nations i listed, much less adding in all of europe.

nor is there enough atomic fuel to make such a switch environmentally friendly. unless you think you'd rather be grazing dinosaurs when all the cattle die of heat exhaustion from the rising CO2 levels.. the problem is real, in one generation we've gone back 600,000 years, in 3 more 300 million years. if we don't stop using fossil fuels there will be a few places in Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska, and Antarctica where you can still raise cattle, or other warm blooded creatures, and that's about it.. within 3 generations of humans ignoring what they're doing to the global weather... pictures don't lie, look at any glaciated region of the world even Antarctica ice shelves have become non existent in one generation of humanity.

Re:Hello?

[mattack2]

Since you have owned them, you know this, but apparently the Swift & Metro are basically the same car (according to wikipedia).

Anyway, my main point was that we can still have good safety standards and have cars with higher mileage. There was yet another hypermiler story on CNN today too.

Re:Hello?

[SuperKendall]

An idiot? Because I don't take my (non-existent) reference disk in? That's pretty pretentious in my book.

Well you see...

Granted, ALL the displays at big box stores suck, because they are connected to the same crappy source, so you can't get a good comparison anyways.

Now why on earth why I might want a common source? Huh.

I did have two parts you know. Either your an idiot or you don't care about video quality. Nothing wrong with that, buy the brightest set and you're out of there.

Plus, I don't think I've actually seen Blu-ray players hooked up to the better hd tvs at those kind of places anyway.

You must not go into Best Buy much.

Re:Hello?

[hairyfeet]

Which is why I think DVD was able to take off,since according to wikipedia DVD was originally designed with help from IBM as a data storage format first,and then later as a video medium. By designing as a *.AA medium first all you are doing is guaranteeing that it will be so full of DRM and crippled that it will be useless for anything else. I have had several customers come to me asking about BD and when I told them that there was no easy way to back them up or rip them so that if their kids scratched it they have to buy a new one that pretty much killed that conversation.

That is what the *.AA just doesn't seem to get. I deal with consumers all day long and while there are some pirates out there they are outnumbered by a HUGE amount by those that simply want to back up what they have,at least around here. It is just too easy no matter how careful you are for a kid to screw up a disc and folks like to put the "real" version up and just keep their movies on a spindle that way the kids can pick their own movies without fear of breakage. And kids are just clumsy,no matter how good they are at being careful. I know because I just had to add a PCI soundcard to my oldest nephew's PC after he tripped while rewiring his PC after replacing his dead PSU(I'm so proud!,sniff) and broke off the jack for the onboard sound. And he is the most careful kid I have ever met.

So until they come out with a disc that I can use for backups and folks can use for their own content easily and cheaply(which is another trend I'm seeing here a lot-the explosion of camcorders and digicams) then I don't see DVD getting replaced anytime soon. Me personally I just added a cheap portacase to a 200Gb that I got for $20 on Black Friday and I'll be using that for short term backups and only bother burning for long term storage. But that is my 02c based on local trends so YMMV.

Re:Hello?

[stewbacca]

I go to Best Buy all the time. All their wall mounted displays use the same horrible daisy-chain video feed, so there is no point in comparison shopping those. They generally do have a little fake living room setup for a mediocre Sony Wega or something, but I have yet to see any of them prominently pushing the Blu-ray player aspect. I don't buy my stuff from big box because they don't carry the high-endish gear I buy. Going to a specialty shop is much better, in that they already have reference disks for you to use, and you don't look like a tool putting one in at Best Buy.

Re:Hello?

[SuperKendall]

Generally I prefer the smaller shops myself...

But Best Buys with the Magnolia tie ins do have higher end stuff to try, usually at least a few things including projectors.

And even if smaller shops have some good reference material, I'd prefer to take in a disc of content I know well. Especially important with music...

Re:Hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's leave it to the colossally ignorant, who aren't intelligent enough to and anything constructive to the conversation, to resort to ripping apart the semantics of a sentence in a piss poor attemt to boost their ego, even thought they understood what the sentence implied anyway.

Wow!! And all this time slashdotters painted themselves up to be the perennial form of supergenius. I should have known better. Go figger. I guess that's the mentality on slashdot these days.

You're too ignorant to even realize the sentence that would have triggered the initial reply was:

Technology is moving way too fast for me to keep replacing my hardware. How it would have changed things if I simply said:

Technology is moving way too fast for me to keep replacing every aspect of my hardware. But then again, I had you guys pegged as being intelligent enough to figure that out. How wrong I was.

Go away fellow A/C. You bother me.

Re:Hello?

[Shadowlore]

"cars aren't the only place where we can save energy, but they are a big one, if we'd just say cars can be a lot lighter, even if they're not as safe, just to get better fuel economy. "

Lighter cars can be safer, they just need to be bigger. Carbon Fiber has a better crush absorption scale - it is smoother than metals. That means it transfers less impact to the occupants. But you want more crumple zone space to account for it. Further UL cars need to be designed that way - simply replacing steel panels with CF doesn't do it. A mid-1970's muscle car body built with carbon fiber - w/o shrinking it, would be a gloriously safe vehicle to be in - even with heavier vehicles on the road. More Weight != safe, Bigger == safer (c.p). The problem isn't the engine or the fuel, the problem with vehicular transportation is the amount of mass carried around to move a small amount of mass. About 66% of energy expenditure in transportation is mass (weight) based. Given the right circumstances, all cars and forms of transportation are fatal at highway conditions. Speed isn't what kills. If that were true airlines would be the most fatal form of transportation.

Fuel economy as a counter to rising prices? Not a chance. The primary driver is the growth of "third world" and Asian countries. The demand created by those nations will prevent US reductions of anything less than 40% or so from having any significant impact. The Chinese, for example, are willing to pay the higher prices. As long as someone else is willing to pay a higher price, and the seller is willing to sell to the highest bidder, your reduction in demand doesn't mean squat.

US demand for liquid fuels is projected to decrease overall by about 330,000 bbl/day in 2008. Meanwhile *worldwide* demand is projected to increase by 1.2 million bbl/day. On the oil side, China is expected to increase by about 500 million bbl/day - more than accounting for US demand decreases in oil. That is *just* China. The EU countries also offset US decreases. The fact of the matter is the US is no longer the master on the demand side of oil. Our influence on oil prices is waning. Another indicator of this is the fact that so far in 2008 our demand has been reduced compared to the same window of 2007. 2007's imports were lower than 2006's which were lower than 2005's. Yet prices are still rising. US Oil consumption is down to levels not seen in 4-5 years. Yet prices still rise.

Demand outstripping supply is a GOOD THING(tm). It means that specific control over oil prices by OPEC goes away. They can raise it, sure, by cutting production. But they can't flood the market with cheap oil. OPEC has a history of doing this when alternatives get competitive. But with demand becoming higher than supply (which will continue), it reaches a point where OPEC simply can not put out enough to cause a major drop in prices. For example, a lot of oil can be extracted at a market price of $75/bbl. But if OPEC can cause the price to drop some 130 to 50, investors will hold off investing in that "new oil" because of that concern. OPEC has done it before. Saudi Arabia's cost to pump and sell a barrel of crude is less than 10 bucks. But they will soon not be able to cause such an event. Viewed from this perspective you don't want to cause a major reduction in oil demand. Additional large sources outside of OPEC will cause an decrease in oil price volatility. which IMO accounts for some $20-45/bbl.

The decrease in volatility along with a reduction in demand driven high prices will create a new "stable" range. I guesstimate it will be in the 75/bbl range. But you can not get there with a market that can be saturated with cheap oil. We need the higher demand. We need to pay the pain of higher prices for a while. Sure it will hurt, but in the end it will be worth it.

That said dollar for dollar, the *best* investment to be had in this country - or most countries even - is *not* in transportation costs, but in home energy - specifically heating and cooling. Every study I've seen that resu

Re:Hello?

[kesuki]

same body, different engine. i liked the swift/metro design, with the backseat folded down i could sleep in the back, on road trips...

I loved that back in the day it only took a 10 spot and I'd get change back. people still called the car a death-trap though even in the day, one person who sold me theirs did so because they started having kids, and were worried they might die in a car crash in that thing.

Re:Hello?

[LordVader717]

The reason for Bluray and HDDVD's existance is that, in contrast to the more ambitious Holographic disc, is that they can cheaply and easily be stamped in large quantities using existing machines, for distributing content, and in this case the only thing worthy of it is HD Video.

As far as people making their own content, I think it's more likely they'll choose solid state storage to plug directly into their TVs or DVD players instead of fiddling around with their own DVD-Rs.

The holographic disc fits in a different niche, namely high-requirement backup.

Standards

[youthoftoday]

How many standards do we need? The ISO should wade in and sort this out ... no wait.

Re:Standards

[Sponge Bath]

... no wait

Too late. Standard Approved.

Includes Section 12.4.56.2 Option 'PlayLike1970-8Track'

Re:Standards

[Agripa]

How many standards do we need?

That is why standards are so nice. There are so many to choose from.

Re:Standards

[HyperQuantum]

Yeah, OMDXML (Open Movie Disk XML). And it's waaaay better than OMDF (Open Movie Disk Format). Or that's what some guy named Steve says.

Watch out, he throws Pringles cans!

Re:Standards

[DarcZide]

One standard to rule them all?

This has GOT to be a hoax!

[sirwired]

After the multi-billion dollar (err... Yen) shellacking that Toshiba just took over HD-DVD, I cannot imagine in their wildest dreams that they would try again. The article notes that this is an unconfirmed rumor, and I fully expect that it is just that, a rumor, and one with absolutely no basis in fact.

SirWired

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[mrbluze]

I cannot imagine in their wildest dreams that they would try again. There are probably animated films in japan depicting the kind of repetitive self flagelation that Toshiba is demonstrating. Probably illegal in most countries too.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[evilviper]

The article notes that this is an unconfirmed rumor, and I fully expect that it is just that, a rumor, and one with absolutely no basis in fact.

My money's on this being the result of some moron tech writer who completely misunderstood what was going on when Toshiba announced something like a new line of up-converting DVD players...

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've read about this before. What Toshiba is concentrating on is enhancing standard DVD's through various extensions to discs that would still play on regular players. The idea is to take over the low end market where most of the action is by putting this content into regular priced DVD's and giving the consumer the choice of when to upgrade their player.
It's not entirely a bad idea, but I doubt Toshiba is in a position to pull this off at this point.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Rogerborg]

Bingo. There's no way on the Invisible Sky Giant's green earth that they will be able to persuade any studio or retailer to support this format in addition to DVD and Blu Ray, after the bath they all just took on HD-DVD. It's just another upscaling DVD player, which is admittedly a pretty good thing for consumers, and a horrid thing for Blu Ray purveyors, who would like DVD to just go away now, thanks very much.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Enderandrew]

My PS3 is a rather nice upscaler, and replaced a $250 upscaler I bought a few years back. Both BluRay and DVDs look great on it, and I'm not throwing away my collection of 350 DVD's anytime soon. So no, BluRay owners don't just want DVDs to disappear. We just want the price on BluRay movies to come down to $20 or less.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[jedidiah]

This sounds like something that could be very interesting
for people who play their content on some sort of computer
but pretty worthless for anyone else (console DVD players).

With h264, 8.5G is still an interesting amount of space.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The man said "Purveyors" not "owners". Obviously owners have no particular interest in DVDs disappearing. Blu-Ray purveyors sure as hell do, though. Prices under 20 dollars are exactly the sort of dangerous ideas that DVDs keep around, and they hardly want that.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Rogerborg]

You may want to look up "purveyor".

Do you happen to know if the PS3 is atypical in upscaling DVDs? It seems like the last thing that Blu Ray purveyors would want is for Blu Ray players to reduce the difference in perceived quality between the two formats.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[morari]

$20 is still pretty expensive for one film. I'd much rather buy a 100 pack of blank DVDs and put them to work in unison with AnyDVD/CloneDVD2 and my NetFlix account.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Anonymous Coward]

By content, I meant to infer additional picture quality data.

It would be nice if an extra layer could be built into DVDs that existing players wouldn't see. Then you could hide all kinds of stuff in there for next-gen players.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[BUL2294]

My money's on this being the result of some moron tech writer who completely misunderstood what was going on when Toshiba announced something like a new line of up-converting DVD players...

Yeah, they're called HD-DVD players. Seriously, the R&D has already been done--the hardware has been developed, a base format's in place. My personal feeling is that a firmware update is all that's needed for existing HD-DVD players to support this new format. (After all, the compression would probably be less intense than HD-DVD or Blu-Ray).

Toshiba's R&D costs may be limited to programming a new firmware for existing hardware... Pennies, in the grand scheme of things.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Enderandrew]

First off, if you don't pay for content, then don't be outraged when that content disappears. The PC gaming industry gets worse and worse every year due to piracy. All of my favorite PC game houses went bankrupt.

Next, how much time does it take to rip that DVD, convert it to fit on a single layer disc, burn it, label it, etc?

Most of my DVDs I buy used from Hollywood Video or Blockbuster. They pretty much always have a 3 for $25 deal. I'm paying $8 for a movie to own it legally.

My time is worth far more than $8 an hour, so even if it only takes 1 hour to pirate a DVD, then it really is a huge waste.

I'd happily pay $20 for BluRay movies at this point. And while Wal*Mart, Best Buy and the like are trying to sell movies for $35 a pop (and wondering why sales are so low) Amazon.com sells tons of BluRay movies for $20 or less.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[MasaMuneCyrus]

Based on fact or not, this article has reasonably solid-backing -- this story was run a couple day ago in the Yomiuri Shinbun, which is not only a major newspaper in Japan, but it has the highest newspaper circulation in the world.

Here's the original article for those that read Japanese:
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/net/news/20080529nt05.htm

Here's a translated article for those that don't:
http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/web/?wb_lp=JAEN&wb_dis=2&wb_url=http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/net/news/20080529nt05.htm

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Leonard Fedorov]

Could you care to name which PC gaming houses you like went bankrupt? And some sort of evidence that this was due to piracy?

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[MasaMuneCyrus]

And on reviewing the original article, I don't see anything that implies that it comes from an unnamed official. The whole article is reported as though this is a fact, so I'm guessing it is.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on now- let's think about this.

Sony comes out with Blu-Ray, Toshiba creates HD.

After lots of competition going on, Sony supposedly pays off Toshiba an undisclosed (but presumably large) sum of money to drop HD.

If this model holds, all Toshiba has to do is keep creating competing formats and make sure that the production cost of the entire project stays below the amount Sony will pay them to drop it.

All we need now is to have Toshiba send Sony a copy of The Producers in their new format and it'll be perfect.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[cpotoso]

My time is worth far more than $8 an hour, so even if it only takes 1 hour to pirate a DVD, then it really is a huge waste.

You watch as the dvd is being ripped/compressed/burned? And I thought the computer did it on its own... Ignorant me :-) (it only takes 5 minutes of a person's time to achieve the r/c/b of a DVD)

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Anonymous Coward]

Buying used and just a step up from piracy. The creator gets no money for the product the second time. Only difference is that it's legal.

I buy used myself so this is hypocritical, but it's still true. I'm just saying that game devs and indie movie studios get just as much profit from you buying a used movie as they get from you pirating the movie.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Enderandrew]

Origin, Looking Glass Studios, Black Isle come immediately to mind. LucasArts also went bankrupt, and laid everyone off. There is a company today called LucasArts, but it is a new company that operates out of ILM. Some companies like Maxis and Sierra are shells of their former selves, with the parent company folded basically, and a large publisher buying the name.

And talk to any game dev. I used to be a real forum rat for various game development forums. There is a reason that game houses prefer to develop for consoles. Sales on consoles are higher, not because there are more consoles on the market than PCs, but because PC higher is far higher than console piracy.

Console piracy exists, but is far more difficult.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[brentrad]

While I agree about paying for content, to correct your statement about how much of your time it takes to copy a DVD:

Using AnyDVD and CloneDVD2 takes about 5 minutes of your time to copy a DVD. It takes about 1/2 hour to an hour or more for your computer to rip, convert to fit on a single layer disc, and burn it (depending on the speed of your computer) but you don't have to babysit it. You can go do something else or use your computer for other purposes. Not that I have ever copied a DVD myself, but I hear this is how it works... ;)

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[adolf]

1 hour to pirate a DVD?

Sheeeit.

It takes about 3 minutes of my time (including scribbling a label on the disc with a Sharpie) to dupe a DVD. It takes the computer between 20 minutes and a couple of hours, depending on a few things like quality options and the condition of the source material.

Note the distinction between human time and machine time. I don't need to sit and babysit the computer while it rips a DVD, nor (with the abundance of cheap RAM and CPU power these days) does it interrupt my other computer activities.

It goes like this:

1. Decide to dupe a DVD.
2. Insert DVD.
3. Load DVD Shrink.
4. Wait for DVD Shrink to get done with its first-pass analysis (I can do other things during this time, but if I'm being impatient it takes about 2 minutes to finish this step).
5. Remove Spanish, French, and other non-English content
6. Remove noise from menus (!).
6a (optional). Tweak compression ratios to shrink the trailers and credits more, and the main movie less.
7. Push the go button
8. Label and insert blank DVD into other drive.
9. Return in an hour or so to find one freshly-burned DVD.

No problem. And certainly not an hour, either.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Sales on consoles are higher, not because there are more consoles on the market than PCs, but because PC [piracy] is far higher than console piracy. That's an awful big leap of logic on your part, got some supporting evidence for it?

The only thing you can do with a console is play games, thus anyone who has one is going to buy games and nothing else. Whereas most PCs never even run a game beyond solitare. Even the home PCs that are used for games are only used that way part time - I think you would be hard pressed to find a PC that was used for games more than it was used for general web-browsing never mind word-processing and other home-pc tasks.

In other words, the competition on PCs is much greater than it is on consoles because not only do you compete with all the other games, you also compete with all the other uses for a PC.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[stickyc]

First off, if you don't pay for content, then don't be outraged when that content disappears. The PC gaming industry gets worse and worse every year due to piracy. All of my favorite PC game houses went bankrupt.

Next, how much time does it take to rip that DVD, convert it to fit on a single layer disc, burn it, label it, etc?

Most of my DVDs I buy used from Hollywood Video or Blockbuster. They pretty much always have a 3 for $25 deal. I'm paying $8 for a movie to own it legally.

Okay, this argument doesn't really work. When you buy used like that, guess who gets 100% of that revenue? Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Not the publishers. As far as they're concerned, you might as well be pirating the movies. If you search around, you'll find the publishing houses (movies, music, and games) blame their losses on the used market just as much as piracy (example here).

My time is worth far more than $8 an hour, so even if it only takes 1 hour to pirate a DVD, then it really is a huge waste.

If it's taking you more than 5 minutes of your time, you're doing it wrong. Insert DVD, launch ripper app, click "Rip", go do whatever it is that's more "worth your time".

I don't know many folks who actually re-burn DVD rips anymore, especially when the new consoles can play media from a USB drive or even network shares. Even if you did, if it's taking you more than 3 minutes to swap disks, fire up your burning software, start the burn, eject, and scribble a title, you're doing it wrong again. NOTE - If you're sitting there watching the ripping or burning parts, you probably actually aren't worth more than $8/hr.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Tumbleweed]

After the multi-billion dollar (err... Yen) shellacking that Toshiba just took over HD-DVD, I cannot imagine in their wildest dreams that they would try again.

Yeah, that's what I thought about Bush being reelected in 2004. *sigh*

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Anonymous Coward]

RIP and Burn DVDs? I haven't done that in years. Just download and play it on your XBOX. Much faster and besides, it's better for the environment. I'm not using any plastic or gas driving to get the movie. And about the time argument, I'm way ahead of you.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[morari]

Actually, I find that the time depends more on how much compression has to be done. Obviously a faster computer will help, but I don't think you see too much of a benefit from having a super fast computer as opposed to just a fast one. If you're just straight-up copying something it can be as little as five minutes. However, if you're cutting out all of the menus and compressing the data down to a single layer disc it can take up to about twenty minutes in total.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Just Some Guy]

Next, how much time does it take to rip that DVD, convert it to fit on a single layer disc, burn it, label it, etc?

First, I've never downloaded a movie. Shock and surprise! But it's true.

Second, if I were going to, I'd be playing them off a PC. Is downloading a movie really that much more difficult and time consuming than ripping it yourself? You can argue copyright violation for ethical reasons, but it's pretty hard to claim that downloading a movie is less convenient than going out to buy and rip it.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Enderandrew]

The direct stated opinions of several game devs who said they stopped developing for PCs because of piracy.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Danse]

The PC gaming industry gets worse and worse every year due to piracy. All of my favorite PC game houses went bankrupt. The PC gaming industry gets worse and worse because consoles have gotten so huge. Now every publisher wants to publish on all platforms so that they can make the most money possible. This leads to shitty, lowest-common denominator games that the console crowd thinks are awesome. PC gamers are used to different kinds of games, but those kinds mostly don't get made now, or get turned into consolized crap. They may try to blame piracy, but that's mostly bullshit. Some of them even admit that. I can't blame people for not wanting to buy most of the PC games that have come out in the last few years. They've butchered a lot of formerly great franchises.

Then there's the fact that piracy on consoles is even easier than it is on PCs. No messing with drive emulators or firewalls. Just buy an adapter that costs about as much as a game, flip a switch and you can play copies of any game you like.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Enderandrew]

There are fewer consoles out there than there are PCs. Yet consoles keep rising, why? Developers want to publish for the biggest platform that allows them the most sales.

Yet, even when console penetration was relatively small, people were moving from PCs to consoles, because of piracy.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Danse]

There are fewer consoles out there than there are PCs. Yet consoles keep rising, why? Developers want to publish for the biggest platform that allows them the most sales. Most of the PCs out there aren't suitable for running the kinds of games that are being made these days. They don't run much more than the kinds of casual games you'd see from PopCap and the like. So your comparison is way off. PCs are bought and used for a huge variety of reasons, gaming being a rather smallish slice. Consoles are pretty much universally dedicated to gaming. Much easier market to target. Much less discerning customers. Much easier to develop for due to the uniform hardware. It has a lot of advantages, but piracy is not one of them. Piracy is easy on consoles.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Wdomburg]

And Oldsmobile didn't get any money when I bought my car. Does that mean it was "just a step up" from theft?

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole article is reported as though this is a fact, so I'm guessing it is. You must be new to this whole 'media' thing.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Gr8Apes]

Reasons for low sales?

Let's see - $20-40 for a BD movie, $500+ for a BD player, or $4-14 for a DVD movie and $30-50 for a DVD Player with a much larger selection (and those would be new movies, btw, not used.)

There's also the issue that for a BD movie to actually be better, you also need a $2K+ TV, which the vast majority does not own. BTW, if you happen to own an older HDTV (prior to HDMI/DVI) odds are that the electronics in it are going to give you a nice upconverted picture without having to buy an upconverting DVD player.

As for copying a DVD - it has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with those damn UOPs. I rip my own so I can actually get to the movie instead of watching 4-10m of BS crap you can't forward through. I only do that for the incredibly small set of disks I buy that I will watch more than once in 5 years - namely - disks my kids watch. Also prevents destruction of original disks. A nice bonus.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[plague3106]

Okay, this argument doesn't really work. When you buy used like that, guess who gets 100% of that revenue? Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Not the publishers. As far as they're concerned, you might as well be pirating the movies. If you search around, you'll find the publishing houses (movies, music, and games) blame their losses on the used market just as much as piracy (example here [next-gen.biz]).

Your argument doesn't really work because you assume the person would buy the new DVD. People set what price they want to pay; if the product remains out of that range, people won't buy it.

Your "argument" could be used for vaccuum cleaners; buying a used on though doesn't count as a loss for a new vaccuum. So, in the end I don't really buy your argument; a DVD is a product just like a vaccum cleaner, and companies that make such devices seem to be kicking around just fine.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Mr2001]

When they say "piracy", what they really mean is "poor sales". They see that their game isn't selling well, they see a lot of people playing it for free, and they assume that if only they could've stopped those pirates from playing for free, the game would've sold more copies. But, as we know from basic economics, that isn't how it really works.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[srussell]

First off, if you don't pay for content, then don't be outraged when that content disappears. The PC gaming industry gets worse and worse every year due to piracy. All of my favorite PC game houses went bankrupt.
...
Most of my DVDs I buy used from Hollywood Video or Blockbuster. They pretty much always have a 3 for $25 deal. I'm paying $8 for a movie to own it legally.

Do you think the studios get any of that $8 per movie? I'd be surprised if buying used games, movies, or CDs helped push the industry along in any significant amount.

--- SER

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[LordVader717]

If by "buy an adapter" you mean buy a bircuit board, rip open you case (voiding you warranty) and solder it to some conectors, yeah, that's all you have to do.
Most people aren't comfortable with that.

But most PC gamers would be able to follow "search for a torrent of a readily cracked game, wait, and install"

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[BryanL]

Wait, in one breathe you claim the high ground in how you support PC game companies by paying for their products. And you accuse those who pirate of bankrupting game studios.

In the next breathe you say how you circumvent paying movies studios by buying used DVDs (I know those aren't your words, but that is essentially what you are doing). You realize that studios don't get your money right?

You can't have it both ways. You can't berate others for bankrupting one industry while advocating doing it to another (or at least minimizing their profits).

And FTR I have never downloaded a PC game or other software illegally so I am not defending those that do. I am just wondering how your comment got modded insightful when it doesn't quite compute for me.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Omestes]

As far as they're concerned, you might as well be pirating the movies. If you search around, you'll find the publishing houses (movies, music, and games) blame their losses on the used market just as much as piracy (example here [next-gen.biz]).

I'm okay with that. I've made a conscious decision not to support any large media conglomerates with my wallet, the only time I'll buy any media is if it is a small indie publisher, or (for music) small indie bands, from their own concerts. I don't want to support Hollywood, or the RIAA members, thus all of my money goes to local used music/video chains.

If this makes Hollywood shut down eventually, I'm also okay with that. If there was not summer blockbusters, I'm sure I wouldn't really notice, nor find much a reason to care.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Enderandrew]

If I bought a used DVD from some trading place or pawn shop, then the studio gets the $20 once, and that is it.

Movie rental chains pay something like $120 to purchase a DVD, so I'm not bankrupting the studio by purchasing that DVD used.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Enderandrew]

Amazon sells plenty of BluRay movies for $20 or less. I've yet to see a single movie ever listed for more than $35. The PS3 is arguably the best BluRay player on the market, and it goes for $400.

My 50" Sony Bravia 1080p was $1250 brand new.

Your math is a little off.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Pop69]

I'm paying $8 for a movie to own it legally.

I think you'll find that you don't own it. You've most likely bought a licence to view it under certain limited conditions (home and domestic use probably)

Just because something came on physical media doesn't mean you own it.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Enderandrew]

No, Uwe Boll sells me his films for $8 a pop. I guess I'm the high bidder.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[glitch23]

My time is worth far more than $8 an hour, so even if it only takes 1 hour to pirate a DVD, then it really is a huge waste.

Well, the only time I consider to be involved in pirating a movie is the time it takes me to scan the newsgroups (let's say 5-10 minutes, then the time to select the files to download (let's say 10 seconds), then the time it takes me to initiate the file extraction once downloaded (let's say 10 seconds), then the time it takes to open Nero and setup the burn process (let's say 1 minute). I don't include the time to download/extract/burn the files because I can do many other things during that time. So all in all I put in about 10 minutes on average which may be equal or less than the time for you to drive to your Hollywood Video/Blockbuster to buy a movie, not to mention the added cost of gasoline which in the past didn't matter but now it can. Now granted, I can only get a movie that has been posted somewhere unless I would make a request (which I don't) so there is that issue if you want to consider that one. I don't view it as an issue. If I don't find an interesting movie to download then oh well. I wasn't going to buy it anyway so I just don't watch it at all. I don't look for any particular movie. If I find one I like I'll download it.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Danse]

But most PC gamers would be able to follow "search for a torrent of a readily cracked game, wait, and install" If you've ever worked a tech support job or read the comments on a torrent site, you'd know that most PC users couldn't follow those instructions to save their lives. They get confused by things as simple as copying a cracked exe and overwriting the original, let alone using something like Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120%.

If by "buy an adapter" you mean buy a bircuit board, rip open you case (voiding you warranty) and solder it to some conectors, yeah, that's all you have to do.
Most people aren't comfortable with that. Voiding the warranty is a given, but the actual modding is not that hard. You can even buy them pre-modded, or just pay the neighbor kid 50 bucks to do it for you.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but reporting on DVD technology isn't politicized or the subject of propaganda quite like a war is.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[dangitman]

Most of the Blu-Ray discs I've bought from Amazon have been around $20, some less.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[dangitman]

The only thing you can do with a console is play games,

Say what? My PS3 is used around 75% of the time as a client for my media server, around 15% of the time for playing Blu-Ray movies, and about 10% of the time for playing games.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[dangitman]

I don't get what you are implying. In CloneDVD, it doesn't take any more of the user's time to remove menus or compress data. Removing menus doesn't take any time - you just click the option to only copy the main feature, versus clicking the option to copy the whole disc with menus and extra features. The compression is done by the computer, and doesn't take any extra user input.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[dangitman]

You can't have it both ways. You can't berate others for bankrupting one industry while advocating doing it to another (or at least minimizing their profits).

You also can't use verbs as nouns. Well, you can, but you probably shouldn't (except in those cases where the noun is also the verb).

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[evilviper]

The creator gets no money for the product the second time.

That's a horribly unfair way to put it.

I could just as well say that half as many people would have bought the game (at the selling price) in the first place, if they knew before-hand that they couldn't ever re-sell it...

So first-sale doctrine does affect the initial sale price of games, just as much as the resale value of cars affects the sale price, and/or the number of buyers at a certain price...

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[evilviper]

When you buy used like that, guess who gets 100% of that revenue? Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Not the publishers.

You're assuming Blockbuster and Hollywood Video would have paid just as much, and would have bought just as many copies of a movie, if they knew before-hand that they would be unable to sell it.

Presumably, the ability to resell the used disc raises the price Blockbuster/Hollywood Video is willing to pay (to the publishers) by $8... (Probably less, thanks to a large number of discs being damaged before they can be sold, but the point remains).

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[morari]

I wasn't implying user time at all, but the actually ripping/burning time. Sorry for the confusion. Though sometimes those extra audio tracks can be tricky to nail down, depending upon what you want. That, perhaps, is the only area where you sometimes need to be careful while not just copying the entire thing.

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost of gaming PC: >$1000
Cost of Wii: $250

I'm sorry, what were you saying about pirates or something?

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[Gr8Apes]

Not all of us want a game system as a BD player for a variety of reasons, but we can use your $400 number - that still doesn't compare very well with $0 (for existing) or <$50 for buying a new DVD player.

Apprently I've not been keeping up with low-end HDTV prices as they appear to have dropped some. Although not yet to the point where Joe 6pack can comfortably go down to the store and pick one up to replace his perfectly fine current unit (from his perspective). So the implication of my statement stands.

As for movies - those are all overstocks of older movies for under $20. I mean, come on, Predator and Commando still sell for over $20 each. (Predator's MSRP btw, is a measely $39.95) But, yes, you can get BD movies for $20+, with occasional movies hitting less. That still doesn't invalidate my price range. Not everyone is going to go to Amazon. Actually, I wonder if the "low" pricing has more to do with a sudden inexplicable drop in BD sales more than anything else?

Re:This has GOT to be a hoax!

[GWBasic]

Origin, Looking Glass Studios, Black Isle come immediately to mind. LucasArts also went bankrupt, and laid everyone off. There is a company today called LucasArts, but it is a new company that operates out of ILM. Some companies like Maxis and Sierra are shells of their former selves, with the parent company folded basically, and a large publisher buying the name. And talk to any game dev. I used to be a real forum rat for various game development forums. There is a reason that game houses prefer to develop for consoles. Sales on consoles are higher, not because there are more consoles on the market than PCs, but because PC higher is far higher than console piracy.

Don't just point the finger at piracy. I always had trouble getting PC games to run due to poor drivers, weird hardware conflicts, or games that needed me to upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware. After a few dissapointments, I realized that consoles are cheaper and more reliable for games.

There's another way to say it: A game that needs a $2000 machine to run it will always have a smaller audience then one that needs a $400 machine.

Seriously

[Rik Sweeney]

Who the hell is going to buy this? Even if it proves to be a superior format, Toshiba have already shot themselves in the foot by dropping HD-DVD which they helped create. What's to say they won't drop this format too?

Re:Seriously

[JasterBobaMereel]

The same people who have bought HD-DVD and BluRay

Is the film plot any different than on DVD? No
Is the film characters any different than on DVD? No

A bad movie with special effects is a bad movie, a bad movie on BluRay is a bad movie ...

Re:Seriously

[OrangeTide]

dood, they have the King Kong remake in HIGH DEF!

Re:Seriously

[Gilmoure]

What about Ishtar?

Re:Seriously

[dangitman]

A bad movie with special effects is a bad movie, a bad movie on BluRay is a bad movie ...

But a movie with quality cinematography is better on a higher resolution medium than the same movie in low-resolution. Would you rather watch 2001: A Space Odyssey as a 70mm theatrical print, or as a video on YouTube?

Re:Seriously

[JasterBobaMereel]

Neither: I have already seen it several times - Cinema , Normal TV, DVD, thank you ... and do not want to pay to see it again .....

Re:Seriously

[dangitman]

For fuck's sake, way to miss the point! It's a hypothetical question, and the very reason I chose that film was the presumed familiarity of it among slashdotters. I wasn't literally asking you to watch the movie again, but to consider the nature of such a film in a visual medium.

Gah

[TPJ-Basin]

Worst. Idea. Evar.

Re:Gah

[ZorinLynx]

I'd say so too.

Pride can be a good thing in the business world, but not when it trumps common sense. Can't toshiba see that consumers don't WANT multiple formats? They want ONE format, and is sold at a reasonable price.

I understand having to buy a new player when technology changes, but I shouldn't have to own two or three different players to be able to play all the movies I want to buy.

It doesn't matter how many promises are made. When you have more than one format, you will always have a studio that will release discs exclusively on one of the formats.

We learned this lesson with VHS versus BETA. Why can't companies see this?

Swallow your pride and embrace Bluray, Toshiba. For your own good, and for the good of everyone.

Re:Gah

[morari]

The problem is that the one format that the consumers ended up with (Blue-Ray) is junk.

good news for microsoft

[OrochimaruVoldemort]

they can cancel their blu-ray player order and just get one of these.

What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ergo98]

There were some pretty passionate debates on here, however many of the Blu-ray supporters cheered on the demise of HD-DVD, surmising that it would accelerate acceptance, reduce prices, simplify things, allow retailers to focus.

Here's what happened since HD-DVD caved in-

• Blu-ray players have gotten more expensive. In some cases, a lot more expensive
• Blu-ray sales, paradoxically, have collapsed
• High definition media gets almost no attention
• Retailers that used to push both Blu-ray and HD-DVD now push....nothing. I find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale.

Just thought it worthwhile to take a moment to point out how things actually turned out. It's pretty remarkable, really, but even Blu-ray did better when it had an opponent to fight. After the battle, most just hung up their cares and said "Meh...upscaled DVD is fine".

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[rob1980]

After the battle, most just hung up their cares and said "Meh...upscaled DVD is fine".

Yeah - having a single high-def format is fine, but to rehash what a lot of people said while the format war was in progress I still don't think it's a killer app for most people the way DVD was over VHS. It's no surprise that Blu-Ray still hasn't taken off the way some had hoped/expected it would.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[SithGod]

While there is no doubt that some of those factors, notably the price, can be chalked up to the decrease of competition, I would say that the new 2.0 Blu-Ray standard is playing a significant role is the lack of players that you're seeing. Most companies don't want to release a player that will be obsolete within a matter of months. The complaints from people about "their player not working like it should" alone should be enough.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[samkass]

The PS3 remains the most popular Blu-Ray player by far and sales appear to be accelerating. Blu-Ray's win appears to be what vaulted the PS3 to second place and relegated the XBox360 to third in monthly sales. Sales of Blu-Ray discs tripled in early 2008 after HD-DVD disappeared.

It's true you don't hear about it as much because it's not as new anymore, but I can't find any source that corroborates your assertions.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

what they need to do is get rid of regular DVD which is the new VHS.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[WarwickRyan]

Please could you post references for your assertion? Then you can be modded up and the parent modded down (assuming you're right).

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[SputnikPanic]

HD-DVD is dead and buried, and if Blu-Ray prices don't go down -- substantially and soon -- Blu-Ray will wither on the vine. I was at Costco this weekend and the two Blu-Ray players for sale there were $379 and $449 for Sony and Panasonic models respectively. At Costco! Not many folks I know going to buy at those prices, especially when the gas station is hitting them for $60 every week...

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ergo98]

The PS3 remains the most popular Blu-Ray player by far and sales appear to be accelerating. Blu-Ray's win appears to be what vaulted the PS3 to second place and relegated the XBox360 to third in monthly sales.

No doubt about that -- it is a huge advantage of the PS3. I'm now seeing new XBox 360s for sale sub-$260 (while the PS3 is at the same $399 that it's been at for well over a year), so while Microsoft claimed it wouldn't impact them when HD-DVD failed, I suspect it's going to cost them dearly as they need to try to get sales through price cuts.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Unbelieveable bull.

Over here in EU what has happened:

- Player prices have dropped, several manufacturers have come up with new devices and many of them are fast, silent and possess a great upscaler for old movies.
- BluRay disc sales have multiplied in the past 6 first months of this year.
- HD gets constant attention, especially in combination with new flat screen tvs, digital television and PS3/X360.
- I keep getting "Get new BluRay player" and "PS3 with BluRay!" ALL the time from almost every imaginable media from print to TV to radio.

I don't know where you live in but over here BluRay is doing just fine and things are picking up nicely.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[spectrokid]

Remember the floppy disc? As it became more older and senile, there was a frantic rush to find a replacement. The Zip drive was the closest contestant, but Iomega refused to let a tidal wave of cheap OEM drives loose on the public. So the floppy was replaced by ... nothing. CD's, were used for software distribution, tape for backup, the net for sneakernet and the memory stick for booting. Expect the same to happen here. UPNP media players and the net will kick Blue-ray's ass.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ergo98]

Unbelieveable bull.

Here's what happened after Blu-ray won.

Player prices have dropped? Maybe your stronger Euro is misleading you, but there have been no price drops. Quite the opposite. Blu-ray players used to be freebies with sets, and you'd get a bunch of discs, and there were endless promotions and price cuts. Last I can see, there's zero promotions, and prices average over $400.

BluRay disc sales have multiplied in the past 6 first months of this year

I Am Legend almost singlehandedly accounted for a spike in the minuscule sales totals for Blu-ray.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Recession plays an obvious part in discretionary spending on things like hi-def

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[robmv]

Maybe this is what you are looking for: BD licenses reportedly granted to 11 China makers

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[McNihil]

According to the grape-wine information channels there will be a massive push regarding BluRay content tomorrow Jun 3 2008.

How massive I have no idea of BUT the content selection so far has been below par and only a select few titles that are currently on BR is of any worth on massive scale which obviously show that was in a holding pattern for an extended time. Same "shitty" content select existed for HD-DVD.

But yes the disk price needs to get down to below $25 a pop too.

The big thing is that consumers that previously were happy buying DVD's for its quality over VHS are not doing so anymore... 1) No money, 2) Want the title in BR, 3) Renting it

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Cornelius the Great]

I think the reason why we haven't been seeing an increase in hd media sales is that the BD releases lately have been rather lackluster lately. Most of the movies I'd like to see in HD are not yet available on BD.

And retailers are having a difficult time selling dedicated BD players during a time when the PS3 is the only cost-effective, future-proof BD player on the market. Until dedicated players with BD 2.0 support drop below $300, it will be a difficult sale.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

I can. It's called "a big box store." Last time I was in one, there was absolutely no mention of Blue-Ray amongst the HD TVs, and you could not find a Blue-Ray player. (Only reason I know the latter is because I looked at the up-scaling DVD players before laughing at the prices and leaving without buying anything. I don't know why I keep on stopping by them, I guess I never learn.)

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[brunes69]

This is what really sucks about BD. The constantly changing profile spec.

What is essentially a "movie appliance" should not need to be firmware-upgraded to play a disc. It is just STUPID.

HDDVD got that right - build all the features into the minimum spec from the get-go.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[CastrTroy]

And the Wii, which can't even play DVD, is outselling both of them. I think Nintendo was smart to stay out of this race.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

You're doing it wrong. Every 'big box store' that I've visited has had at least one and often several Blu Ray players hooked up to HDTV's.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

We bought a PS3 for $260 after various rebates and deals. Hard to beat that for Blue Ray player deal.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[engun]

Agreed. I see that as one of two main reasons for blue-ray not being adopted as fast as DVD.

1. DVD media offered great improvement over VHS (no random access, media wear) and VCDs (Poor picture quality, no menus). But what "must have" feature does Blu-Ray offer over DVD? (Sure, the quality is stunning, but DVD quality doesn't exactly make you want to poke your eyes out).

2. You need high-def TVs to really enjoy blu-ray. That costs a boatload of cash. This is my main personal reason for not even thinking about blu-ray at this point. DVD did not make your existing TV obsolete.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[fyrie]

I'd like to see that too. From everything I have read, BluRay has only claimed a small part of HDDVD's sales, and the actual ratio of DVD to HD content has swayed in DVD's direction since the demise of HDDVD.

Speaking of prices, I'm shocked that the retail price of HDDVDs hasn't gone to fire sale levels. Often Amazon sells the BluRay version for less than the HDDVD version. What up with that?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Lumpy]

UPNP players will NOT. every ones out there sucks.

UPNP is a half assed hack. a real player like the AppleTV or better yet a old Xbox with XBMC utterly destroys each and every UPNP player ever made.

Rewind and FF actually work. (Most UPNP players will not rewind at all!) usability problems, and the crappiest software aver made for the players are causing UPNP to fail. also WHY have UPNP?? What the hell is wrong with simply playing the file from a SMB share where you have more control?

UPNP in every way sucks. Someone is going to figure this out and latch on the XBMC project when it get's working really good on linux and make the Media Center device that everyone really wants.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[halcyon1234]

Though, PS3 sales have gone up about 10%. This is due mostly to tons of people saying "OK, BlueRay is now the thing. But BlueRay players themselves are expensive an unreliable. The PS3 is a BlueRay player that isn't the much more expensive than a dedicated player, and has some nice home theater things built in. So if you're going to drop a couple hundred or more on a player, you might just as well buy a PS3. That way, not only do you get a BlueRay-- you get a PS3 too."

I know it worked for my fiance's father. He has a very nice home theater setup (projector, big screen, surround, etc). Just after Christmas, he bought into HDDVD. A week later the format was killed off. So, wanting to stay HD-current, he took the advise of his Home Theater forum and bought a PS3. Not that I mind-- GTAIV and Rock Band on a 102" screen is pretty sweet.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Enderandrew]

"Blu-ray players have gotten more expensive. In some cases, a lot more expensive."

The PS3 still gets often the best reviews as a player, it gets firmware downloads all the time, it has built-in wifi to get those downloads, oh, and you effectively get a free console with it as well.

For $400, it is pretty hard to beat.

And Amazon.com has great BluRay movie sales all the time.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ivan256]

It's the same thing that happened with laserdisc after it was discontinued. No new content is being made, and old content is getting scarce. People with those players are willing to pay a premium to get the content before it's no longer available.

A secondary factor is that distributors are giving volume discounts to resellers for BluRay, but HD-DVD isn't selling enough anymore to qualify.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[samkass]

Here's a quote from "Home Media Magazine":

"...And according to Nielsen VideoScan sales data, the nascent Blu-ray Disc saved the day for the sellthrough business, with DVD unit sales in the first quarter down 1.2% from the first quarter of 2007 but Blu-ray Disc sales up a whopping 351% [for the first quarter in 2008]."

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Kibblet]

I can't find a player other than a PS3. I already have an Xbox 360. I have this brand new TV, and can't use it to its full advantage unless I play the XBox or get a movie off of XBox Live. You see, my cable company has a waiting list for the HD boxes. My parents went through the same thing 1000 miles away. I would LOVE to get a player, and movies, that would use the HD part of my TV. But it's not going to happen any time soon. Had I known that I couldn't even get an HD box from my cable company, I would have spent my money elsewhere. What a waste.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ColdWetDog]

According to the grape-wine information

Never trust a group of drunken sods for your high tech information.

Go with the caffeine addicts. We're smarter.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ivan256]

Sounds like somebody has never heard of DLNA, and has never used a PS3.

Why not play from an SMB share? Easy. Every SMB player out there uses a different method of storing meta-data, or disregards meta-data entirely.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Skye16]

No, HD made my existing TV obsolete. I won't purchase another TV, ever again, unless it is HD.

After having it in my home and enjoying it for the last year and a half, I can honestly say that even though the particular model I bought was half the price I paid for it a year later, it was still worth every penny to me. I can barely stand to watch SDTV now.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

# Retailers that used to push both Blu-ray and HD-DVD now push....nothing. I find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale. Pssst... hey buddy, wanna buy a PS3?? It (kinda) upscales your DVD collection!

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[CastrTroy]

I still think that BluRay is a much better implementation than any online distribution methods for movies currently available. It would be nice if you could just download the movie, and play it on any computer, or burn it to a DVD, but I haven't seen an online method that gives you this. Currently the downloads cost the same or more than the DVDs, and don't have extra content. They can't be burned to DVD, and can only be played on a select list of DRM enabled programs. If you want to watch them on your TV, you have to buy a box that only works with that specific service, or run a wire from your computer to the TV. As nice as it would be to have the ideal digital distribution system in place, the current offerings aren't anywhere close to ideal. It doesn't even seem like they are trying. As far as HD video goes, the best offering is BluRay.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[angus_rg]

Sales of Blu-Ray discs tripled in early 2008 after HD-DVD disappeared. You don't hear it because just last week it was announced that 3 times increase translated to 5% BR vs. 95% DVD.

Basically, they are making a video version of SACD. The move makes sense, especially since it could segway into reviving HD-DVD.

They need to convince people that the DVD can look as good as BR. People have been putting HD movies on DVD for a while now, but overcoming perception is another story. People already think this is only a "super" upconverting DVD player. Throw in perceptions of the last war, and you've got yourself a sequel for the Titanic.

Fortunately, they are probably recycling already researched/developed technology, so the sinking ship is more like a canoe.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Zironic]

That's what's known as misleading statistics. It's easy going up an impressive percentage when your original value was really low.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Shai-kun]

God you are so right. I really want to like UPnP (it works pretty nicely on the 360 and PS3), but the fact that there is literally not a single un-horrible Windows player out there (at least that I have found) kinda kills it for me.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[TheGratefulNet]

What is essentially a "movie appliance" should not need to be firmware-upgraded to play a disc. It is just STUPID.

you do realize, though, that EVERY time you watch a movie - that 1 minute delay of 'loading the disc' is really loading and RUNNING executable code, checking for 'bad hardware' that should be REVOKED (ie, your hardware that some corp. entity NOW thinks should be disabled, perhaps even permanently). then finally, once its done being 'undercover cop' it then lets you view the movie. want to see the movie again? same 'cop behavior' all over again.

I don't own BD and never will. I was at best buy recently and I ejected and reinserted a BD disc. it took nearly a minute to load. I LAUGHED MY ASS OFF. people accept this? really??

it turns out that any BD drive connected to your network or computer is now the least secure thing ON your network. its all black box and you can't know what damage it might WANT to do to some of your hardware. completely untrusted and there's no 'permit/allow' ability if you are even the system owner - you MUST accept whatever damage the BD software wants to do to your system.

and all that just to watch a simple movie. it should be a crime, how they conned innocent people into accepting this 'virus-in-a-box' called BD.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Arkham]

HD-DVD is dead and buried, and if Blu-Ray prices don't go down -- substantially and soon -- Blu-Ray will wither on the vine. I was at Costco this weekend and the two Blu-Ray players for sale there were $379 and $449 for Sony and Panasonic models respectively. At Costco! Not many folks I know going to buy at those prices, especially when the gas station is hitting them for $60 every week... No doubt. I have all HD TVs in my house, and I'd love to stop buying DVDs and get Blu-Ray. But with the economy the way it is, and with my $119 1080p-upscaling Sony DVD player doing a fine job, I'm hardly chomping at the bit to blow $500 on a player right now for the right to pay 3x as much for movies as I do now.

When I can get a Blu-Ray player for under $200, and movies for $20 or less, I'll switch.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Doctor Faustus]

Retailers that used to push both Blu-ray and HD-DVD now push....nothing. I find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale.
Nobody was buying standalone Blu-Ray players in the first place. The 40 gig PS-3 is basically the same price and can upgrade itself to new specs

If you feel like trying out some of the more esoteric features, I hear it can even play games.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Xtravar]

I was ecstatic when I found out the PS3 could play media off of my network.

Until I found out that it couldn't play 90% of my stuff because of codec incompatibilities.

And I can't seek through the files that actually do play.

But gee whiz, it sure is great for looking at JPGs.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[residieu]

If only for the reason that it kept their price down. I recently got a HD TV, and have thought about getting a PS3 to see what HD can really do, but the prices are still too high. (So I'm stuck with upscaled (often badly) content from the cable company). Widescreen DVDs look good taking up the whole screen, though.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Jeremy Erwin]

I can barely stand to watch SDTV now.

Does that extend to DVDs?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[SengirV]

I remember getting blasted when I told people that would happen. At the time of the HD-DVD demise announcement, I said it would be 2.5 years before we see a blu-ray player come down to the magical $99 mark. People laughed and said they would be $199 by this XMas, with some deals to be had at $150.

Looks like I was actually being TOO optimistic in my prediction.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

What is essentially a "movie appliance" should not need to be firmware-upgraded to play a disc.And it doesn't. The only thing the firmware upgrade or a profile 2.0 player is needed for is some extra features like internet connectivity, picture in picture audio comentaries, and I forget what other feature. Any movie and majority of features will play fine in any profile 1.0 player.

For me profile 2.0 is useless; it offers nothing worth waiting for that I'll ever use (I guess some people will, but seriously how many?). Seems like I hear plenty of people complaining about how older players don't play movies and what not, when the only thing you don't get is the stupid picture in picture during the audio comentary.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[terjeber]

Here's what happened since HD-DVD caved in-

• Blu-ray players have gotten more expensive. In some cases, a lot more expensive

Rubbish. There was a small increase in price on players as the price of blu laser diodes went up, but there has been no consistent or significant increase in Blu-Ray players. Last week you could buy Blu-Ray players in stores for about $299. I would love to see how that is a "a lot more expensive".

• Blu-ray sales, paradoxically, have collapsed

Are you just making up your arguments as you go or are you just full of it? Take a look at this one and tell me that Blu-Ray sales are collapsing.

Over the last 30 days Blu sales on Amazon have gone from -70 to -30 or -20 vs standard DVD staying fixed at around -10. I fail to see how that is a "collapse" in sales.

• I find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale.

So you never leave your house any more?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

This is entirely different. The DVD isn't getting older and senile. It still works quite well for its original purpose (playing movies). As a data-storage medium bigger is always nicer, but it is still holding out well now.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ivan256]

The fast-forwarding and rewinding are a function of the DLNA server. The PS3 happily supports both of those features if the server supports them.

More codecs were added in the December 18th firmware. It supports:

MPEG-1
MPEG-2 (PS,TS)
H.264/MEPG-4 AVC
MPEG-4 SP
DiVX/XViD

Additionally, DLNA servers can transcode, and container-shift. So if you happen to have 90% of your "stuff" in a codec other than one of those (that are used by 90%+ of the video out there), you can still play them.

It sounds like you should get yourself a good DLNA server, and then try your PS3 again.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ergo98]

Rubbish.

Another Blu-ray fanatic.

Are you just making up your arguments as you go

Warner, which sealed HD-DVDs fate, justified their move based upon the fact that DVD sales were in freefall (piracy, more entertainment opportunities most prevalent being the internet, and so on, made DVDs less compelling. Add that to the fact that many just use services like NetFlix or Zip.ca, skipping the whole concept of buying discs). Warner opined that if they made the next-generation format more certain by backing one, that would compel buyers to starting buying optical discs again.

Oh but look -- compared to freefalling DVDs, Blu-ray is only freefalling just as much...over 30 days. COMPELLING.

So you never leave your house any more?

Yeah, okay. A bit of life advice -- getting so passionate and defensive about an optical format is just weird, and it really isn't worth your vitriol. Save it for a political debate or something.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[samkass]

Okay. But the original post, though, stated that Blu-Ray sales have collapsed. Do you agree with that? Citation?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ergo98]

Not to mention that using Amazon for stats doesn't really make that strong of a case.

You can find standard definition DVDs *everywhere* (even in gas stations now), whereas a reasonable collection of high-def media is harder to come by. The fact that high-def does well on an online shopping site...not so surprising.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[JasterBobaMereel]

You poor fool ... ... are you also the one who keeps demanding better graphics in video games... ...but the games people buy are still the ones that play better ...

The programs/films people watch are the good ones not the ones in HD, given the choice I would watch it in HD but ... I don't care enough to pay for it ...

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Xtravar]

Yea, I upgraded my firmware but it still doesn't play anything.

Can you recommend a good DLNA server for Linux that doesn't require too much configuration for transcoding?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[gravis777]

Uh, as far as I know, all current and future BluRay discs are compatable with the old Profile 1.0 systems. You may not be able to take advantage of all the webenabled stuff, and whatknot, but the movie still plays.

On a side note, I got the exact same notes in some of my HD-DVD discs that I got in my BluRay discs - saying something along the lines that the disc may have been manufactored after the player, and you may need a firmware upgrade to experience all of the FEATURES on the disc (not to watch the movie).

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[broeman]

Maybe you could enlighten us with which DNLA server you use.

On linux I haven't found one that runs pretty well yet. I am using mediatomb at the moment, but it only accepts a very small potion of my video content (most are even in the exact same codec, but with different results), and I haven't found one that accepts mp3s at all yet. I know that I could use transcode with mediatomb (for the video), but my mediaserver doesn't really have the power for that.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[terjeber]

Another Blu-ray fanatic.

Ah, so everybody who disagrees with your assertions, assertions that are provably wrong, must be a fanatic? What kind of a sad world is it that you are living in?

Warner, which sealed HD-DVDs fate, justified their move based upon the fact that DVD sales were in freefall

Again, you really are just making up your arguments as you go, are you not? Warner never used this argument at all. The industry as such has been using this argument to go HD, but it was not a factor in Warner choosing one HD format over another. That decision was made back in September, and it was based solely on sales of HD media and support of Blu-Ray as a standard. The fact that Warner chose to wait until this year to announce was a business decision and you can fault them for it, but still, it was not based on DVD sales at all. Moving to HD was of course.

compared to freefalling DVDs, Blu-ray is only freefalling just as much...over 30 days

Making up rubbish arguments and then arguing against them is called a "straw man attack". It is childish, immature and indicates a severe lack of cognitive abilities.

The only reason I pulled out the last months sales data for Blu-Ray, which shows a strong growth for the format, was that you claimed the sales were dropping. Considering Nielsen data shows that Blu-Ray increased more than 350% in the quarter after HD DVD went away (number from memory) you assertion that Blu-Ray sales are dropping is absurd in the extreme. I have never claimed that DVD sales are in free-fall, and I must admit I have never seen anyone else claim it either.

If you are not a rabid fanatic it would be odd since your behavior indicates you are. You make up your own arguments, pull "statistics" out of your ass, and in general scream and shout that you are right though a casual inspection of the real world shows you are wrong. I wish you well, but the kind of fanaticism you suffer from is rarely curable.

getting so passionate and defensive about an optical format is just weird

Yeah, pot-kettle-black. I am not passionate about anything, just about people lying their asses off when they argue their points. Your statement was: "find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale". That's an absurd statement. It can be true only if you find it hard to leave your house. Any electronics chain visited by anyone in the western world or Asia today will have a large number of Blu-Ray players for sale.

You are the one making up ridiculous arguments. Before calling anyone a fanatic, try to be honest, don't lie, take a look at the real data in the real world, and then base your arguments on that. Basing your arguments on paranoid delusions is the trade-mark of the fanatic or the insane.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[terjeber]

Not to mention that using Amazon for stats doesn't really make that strong of a case.

A, finally, a good point. I felt it not necessary to quote the Nielsen data that showed that Blu-Ray sales increased 351% in Q1 not needed since someone else had already quoted that number, but hey, I can still quote it.

So, Amazon and Nielsen both disagree with your delusions. How can that be?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Achromatic1978]

I was at best buy recently and I ejected and reinserted a BD disc. it took nearly a minute to load. I LAUGHED MY ASS OFF. people accept this? really??

Apropos of anything re DRM, etc, I fail to see the issue here - the only time I could see the minute making any difference to your experience in watching a movie is seedy.

"Oh noes, it doesn't start instantly" is "not ideal" not "OMG, how stupid are you to put up with it".

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ergo98]

Ah, so everybody who disagrees with your assertions, assertions that are provably wrong, must be a fanatic?

Someone who comes up slinging insults because their beloved didn't get the care and attention they think it deserves qualifies. See: you. It's just boring, and you need to let go of the HD-DVD/Blu-ray rage. The war is over, guy.

Again, you really are just making up your arguments as you go

Yeah, I sure am. Everyone, if you want to know Warner's decision, just talk to terjeber -- he'll set you straight. It learned it straight from the bastion of truth: His local Blu-ray fan club.

You make up your own arguments, pull "statistics" out of your ass, and in general scream and shout that you are right though a casual inspection of the real world shows you are wrong

The war is over. Put down your guns. Nonetheless, use Google -- you can find it at http://www.google.com/ -- and search up things like DVD sales decline Warner, or Blu-ray sales decline, and find lots and lots of interesting stats for your edification. Perhaps of the sort that you don't find at Blu-Ray-Fanatics.com

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also the case of the poor state of the economy. Though I would assume that many will be buying hdtv's and high def players with their stimulas check, when the economy is doing poorly, it means no one will want to buy a hdtv, therefore will have no use for a bluray player. In a state where money is tight, given the choice between Transformers DVD and BluRay, they'll probably just pick the cheaper. I'm sure HD-DVD would be in the same boat right now.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ivan256]

The only one I know of for linux that is full-featured is Media Tomb, but it is non-trivial to configure transcoding.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Gilmoure]

...especially since it could segway into reviving HD-DVD.

The Segway hasn't been that big of a hit either. Wonder why they're trying to move disks with it?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[SirSmiley]

Sorry I have to disagree. Walmart now carries a lot of bluray movies and didnt used to..they sell about 5x as they did a few months ago...also blockbuster sells bluray

bluray prices have come down, it varies from company to company of production they range from 10-30 dollars

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[residieu]

I think Blu-Ray's biggest problem is its abbreviation. Blu-Ray is a pretty cool name, and gets points for being easier and faster to say than the competing HD-DVD. But the abbreviation BD just loses it all. BD doesn't make you think Blu-Ray, so it's potentially confusing, and it doesn't invoke the coolness of the full name. In speach, BD will either be mistaken for CD, or make you sound like Twiki from Buck Rogers.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[DrXym]

* Blu-ray players have gotten more expensive. In some cases, a lot more expensive / *Blu-ray sales, paradoxically, have collapsed / * High definition media gets almost no attention / * Retailers that used to push both Blu-ray and HD-DVD now push....nothing. I find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale.

I can summarise the above far more succinctly for you:

• January, February, March, April and May happened.

As shocking as this may seem. Sales of consumer electronics take a dump in the first half of the year. Stores don't offer discounts, no new models come out, releases start to dry up and there are no advertising or other promotions. It is no wonder that sales in that period are low. Sales of DVD players are historically 2, 3 or even 4 times higher in the latter half of the year.

June is where things start to happen. That's when model & titles releases occur, promotions and deals kick off properly for Father's day and keep on going to Christmas. It is around about now that things get interesting for Blu Ray. If sales don't pick up then it might be in trouble. But if DVD's experiences are any indicator, things are going to improve markedly starting about now.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[felipekk]

- BluRay disc sales have multiplied in the past 6 first months of this year. Yeah, multiplied by 0.1, but I guess it still counts as multiplied...

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Zironic]

I have no idea how blu-ray sales are going, if I was making a bet I'd say that the next generation of HD will be the one that actually breaks through, blu-ray doesn't offer enough over DVD for the price. I have no data to back this up.

My point was only that your quote was really bad journalism.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Jeff DeMaagd]

2. You need high-def TVs to really enjoy blu-ray. That costs a boatload of cash.

I think that depends on your definition of "boatload of cash". Have you actually looked at pricing lately, or are you just remembering prices from two years ago? Ginormous (42" 1080p) flat panel TVs can be had for under $1000. That was about the cost of a 32" CRT TV five years ago. I recall seeing several HDTVs for $500 and under too.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[TravisO]

>> Microsoft claimed it wouldn't impact them when HD-DVD failed, I suspect it's going to cost them dearly

>> And the Wii, which can't even play DVD, is outselling both of them

Which only goes to prove video game console sales are about video games. Since when did it's movie playing abilities really matter?

Hey ergo98, how is Sony's health plan?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[drsquare]

And the wii is outsold by board games, looks like Nintendo's in the wrong market.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[CastrTroy]

I doubt it. First article I could find says that board game sales are around $800 million (2006). The Wii sold roughly 14 million units in it's first year. At an extremely low estimate of $100 a unit for Nintendo's revenue, that would be 1.4 billion in revenue. That doesn't even count how much they made off the games themselves, or accessories.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[PitaBred]

Use your computer. The upscaling of most software scalers is similar (if not better) to what you'll get off of an upscaling DVD player or Blu-Ray proper. And you can always download HD content, even if it's not full videos.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[SuperKendall]

Someone who comes up slinging insults because their beloved didn't get the care and attention they think it deserves qualifies.

But that describes all your posts so far.

Once more, I yield you the last response so you may continue your odd technique of argument-by-tourette. Hilarious that the one link you offer is some obscure tech blog that has the same fantastical version of events as yourself, you can't even find real proof for anything you say despite your ability to type www.google.com. Perhaps if you tried the Advanced Search?

No wonder you like the swearing so much, much easier.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[McNihil]

Ok ok... according to some java ink blots this morning they too confirmed what the grape-wine phalanx mustered the doused night before.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh noes, it doesn't start instantly" is "not ideal" not "OMG, how stupid are you to put up with it". I disagree. You are stupid to put up with it.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ergo98]

Once more, I yield you the last response

Didn't you yield the last response on your last post? I suspect that you're a little confused about how to do that.

You have said nothing of interest, whatsoever, but started your Blu-ray zealotry display by insults and innuendo. Grow up, SuperKendall, and find something useful to do with your time. Thus far your proof has been an Amazon price chart for an obsolete Sony blu-ray player. You are truly a hilarious person.

And calling The Globe and Mail an obscure tech blog (or maybe you're talking about the other link I posted, which was the NY Times) just seals your absolutely, insurmountable idiocy into the history books.

You are an idiot, SuperKendall. You're a fanatic looking the fight for a cause, so you cast people who aren't even arguing the opposite as your foe. Honestly I'd love to go at it, but you are too stupid, too boorish, and too annoying to bother with.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Fieryphoenix]

Outsold often means units, not solely sales. It's not a meaningful comparison anyway, you have to compare a platform to a platform and game titles to game titles. Compare sales of Wii to sales of tables and you'll be closer, although there are some board game compatible countertops that should fit into the mix somehow.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[makomk]

IIRC, it's not just a firmware upgrade, it's buying a new player - none of the existing companies were planning to issue a firmware upgrade for their existing players that added support for newer Blu-Ray profiles.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember getting my multi-disc dvd player which had a soft power button, plus a start up routine that would look at all five discs in the carriage before it started. You couldn't open the tray or turn the machine off for something like a half minute after turning it on - plus, it would automatically start the first DVD in the player, which meant even more of a delay if there was a DVD in there.

At this point I'm happy enough with my means for watching movies that if a manufacturer purposely makes the technology inconvenient to me, I'm not going to put up with it. (Same goes to unskippable ads at the beginning of movies by Universal.) I have a DVD player that starts up quickly, shuts down quickly, and even will remember my place in a movie and goes there automatically (and I could turn that setting off if I wanted) - why should I take a huge step backwards? After my experiences, I tend to think it is borderline idiotic to accept extremely poor design in a non-essential technology meant to replace something that currently works well.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Shh... He had a great point, don't let facts get in the way.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Cornelius the Great]

You're right. I think Sony et al were trying to avoid the BR abbreviation, since "BR" means bankruptcy in legal shorthand. Maybe they should've called it "Blu-Medium" instead. ;)

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Chris Mattern]

BluRay disc sales have multiplied in the past 6 first months of this year.

Multiplying by 0.5 is still multiplying, right?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean that the US dollar is weak. Most of the players are made in Asia by Asian companies. It's not that the price is increasing, it's that Americans have to pay more of their currency.

Someone else mentioned that prices have gone up in Canada too -- well, Canadians should be familiar with the "USD $x, CDN $(x+y)" that has appeared on many products for a long time, despite the fact that today 1 USD 1 CDN.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Sentry21]

This reminds me of what happened with DVDs when they first came out. Ever seen an early DVD disc? One of the ones with four or five movie previews at the start, which publishers configured to be unskippable? So you have to watch them over, and over, every time you want to watch the movie?

This is also similar to the ads that all HD-DVD discs I've played contain... ads for HD-DVD. 'The look and sound of perfect!' Great, except I already have a damn HD-DVD player! I'm already sold!.

It seems like studios just don't get it sometimes.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Hatta]

Same reason SACD and DVDA haven't caught on. Most people don't have the equipment or the sensory capability to perceive a difference, and if they do it's not big enough for them to care about it. We're into diminishing returns for both high fidelity audio and visual media.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Em Adespoton]

3. DVD came out with a video disc format AND a data storage format -- and right away, end users could burn their own video to DVD and duplicate video to DVD -- just like they were used to doing with VHS, but without the data degradation. Blu-Ray takes that away to a certain degree; suddenly you have a format that can hold a lot of data, but actual recording and playback schemes are segragated, and not all people/corporations are equal when using them.

When someone comes up with a format that allows people to easily read video/audio/data from a disc, modify it, and write it back so that it will play in standard devices, THEN people might be interested in upgrading from DVD.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[angus_rg]

Damn Kaos of the Internet. It's only a matter of time til I start leaving the e off of Blue.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Gilmoure]

Sacre bleu!

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[log0n]

It takes 1 minute to load a BD disk - before you get to the forced previews, etc?

That sounds dangerously close to surpassing "passive entertainment" and heading into "annoyance".

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[terjeber]

slinging insults because their beloved didn't get the care and attention they think it deserves qualifies

You are still just making up reality as you go I see. I have so far not any thing of the kind, I have just pointed out that you have argued entirely based on your own fantasies, and I have pointed out that fantasies and lies are bad sources for arguments.

if you want to know Warner's decision, just talk to terjeber

Nope, talking to me is not the right thing, neither is listening to marketing people. Given the fact that Warner already in early November (seemingly accidentally) made it clear that they were going to back Blu-Ray, and that they also apparently notified Toshiba about this in November, swallowing what Warner Marketing says about their decision making in January is a little silly. But hey, don't think, just eat the marketing material. It is always 100% truthful.

Nonetheless, use Google

I suggest you do so your self. The fact that stand-alone Blu-Ray player sales have declined is neither unknown nor much of a surprise. With the economy going where it is, neither should you be. On the other hand, you weren't talking about stand-alone player sales, you were talking about media sales. In that regard I can also only recommend google, search for "Nielsen blu-ray 351%". As you might know Nielsen tracks the number of DVDs and Blu-Rays sold in the US, and an increase of 351% is not what I would call a significant drop (as I think was your words).

Now, as for player sales, the total number of Blu-Ray players sold is increasing rather significantly, even with your assertion that stand-alone sales are down. The increase you can find in the increase in PS3 sales.

Again, every assertion you have made is wrong. How can you assume that your conclusion is anything but wrong?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[CastrTroy]

If all that counts is units sold, they should start to manufacture toilet paper.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to comment on your other points, having no experience with the European market, but... well, quantity of advertising generally isn't directly proportional to how successful something is. In fact, you usually need more advertising if a product isn't selling well on its own.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

It's taken a while, but the floppy has finally been replaced by cheap USB flash drives. The 1GB variety are down to about $6...not as cheap as floppies, but cheaper than both Zip and Jazz disks.

I also wouldn't be surprised if 2-3 years from now, given the amount of money that's being spent on flash R&D, a viable competitor to BluRay comes along that's flash based. It has a number of advantages over optical media (size, durability, etc) and would allow players to be smaller than current DVD/BluRay players...perhaps even being playable on portable media players and video game systems (succeeding where UMD failed).

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[BrerBear]

Blu-ray sales, paradoxically, have collapsed Really? From a high def site article today

"Projections based on preliminary data show that Blu-ray sales through May have already surpassed sales for all of 2007.

Blu-ray software sales in the first four months of this year more than quadrupled from the same period last year, climbing to 11 million since inception."

I guess you ignored the big Wal-Mart Blu-Ray push of late, and the dropping player prices. Your conclusion doesn't hold up at all.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Weird. I think someone riled up a Blu-ray fanboy hornets nest.

I agree with the poster that blu-ray has gone fucking dormant. The "Walmart" push, I have learned from posts from Blu-ray fanboys, consists of a sale on the PS3 next week. Wow.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Idbar]

Does Costco really sell electronic devices cheaper than you can find them on online retailers (including buying at Circuit City online to pick up)? I'm not sure about that. Although, I believe Costco provides really cheap food and some clothing, I don't believe they provide the cheapest electronics.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[CrashNBrn]

I'll be waiting for the Hologram tech to finally come around :-)

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Jorophose]

Fits perfectly!

Spectrokid, you are now my personal hero.

nVidia is realising a mobile platform that can decode 1080p with 30hours of battery life.

Now, think about it. That's freaking insane. If they manage to package it with HDMI-out (and various adapters coming out of that) and can equip it with WiFi, or give it generous storage, good night bluray. Even VIA's semi-embedded solutions could put an end to bluray.

Let's see, 1TB hard disc or a blu-ray player?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[toddestan]

I can barely stand to watch SDTV now.

Is that on your new TV or on an older TV? I've found that many LCDs and plasmas do a horrible job with SD material, whereas it looks fine on an older SD CRT TV.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Skye16]

Old SD CRT's. It's especially prominent when attempting to watch hockey. Then you're just reacting to the way the player's react, not actually following the puck yourself.

On my big screen, it's better because it's bigger. But when I get a game in HD, I swear I can see the writing on the puck.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[bdo19]

Well, floppy disks were finally, mercifully replaced by flash drives. As you said, Zip drives and CD-RW's were never really good technologies, they were just the best we had at the time. Maybe the same is true for Blu-Ray, and we will someday have an actually-better solid state system that replaces it?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[dangitman]

When someone comes up with a format that allows people to easily read video/audio/data from a disc, modify it, and write it back so that it will play in standard devices, THEN people might be interested in upgrading from DVD.

Uhhh, you can already do this with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The copy-protection schemes have already been cracked, in exactly the same way they were for DVD. So, I'm not sure what your point is. Somebody probably said the same thing about DVD when it was introduced - "This new, weird format cannot be manipulated like VHS can be" but then somebody cracked CSS protection and DVD can be manipulated exactly as VHS was.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[dangitman]

Not really. The quality of CD audio was already at most people's perception limits, and musicians weren't (and aren't) recording in surround sound, just stereo. But the quality of DVD is well below the perceptible quality of 35mm or 70mm movies projected in a cinema. Plenty of average people can see the difference.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[dangitman]

It took 1 minute for those players to load the movie? The just means you were looking at shitty players. Mine doesn't take nearly that long. And it works without internet connectivity. So, you are obviously just making stuff up.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[MrAngryForNoReason]

I'm now seeing new XBox 360s for sale sub-$260 (while the PS3 is at the same $399 that it's been at for well over a year)

I think that has more to do with Xbox 360 launching a year earlier than the PS3. All consoles go through price reductions during their lifetime just other electronics. It works on the basis that different demographics will buy at different price points.

Microsoft have also reduced the production cost of the Xbox 360 by 40% since it launched which means they can offer it a lower price without losing revenue. The PS3 on the other hand set a record for console manufacturing costs losing Sony an estimated $250 per console sold. The Xbox 360 was also originally sold at a loss but not to the same extent.

You seem to be trying to make the point that Microsoft are selling the Xbox at a lower price because they are finding it difficult to compete with the blu-ray equipped PS3 while ignoring the fact that the price of a PS3 is only just cheaper than buying an xbox 360 and a stand alone blu-ray player.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[stewbacca]

Very true. I bought a PS3 and don't play games on it. I couldn't find a regular Blu-ray for cheaper than the PS3 AND I have the added bonus that I have two video gaming boys that love to rent PS3 games from blockbuster when the visit.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[stewbacca]

That's what's known as misleading statistics. It's easy going up an impressive percentage when your original value was really low. ...doesn't detract from the original claim that sales are way up, however. Not to mention that both Blu-ray AND HD-DVD had "really low" original values. I'd take a misleading statistic over a failed, defunct format any day.

Reminds me of the slashdot guy who said the same thing about Apple stock being up 1800%, as if that is no big deal, nor any indication of shifting trends in personal computing...

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[stewbacca]

You're doing it wrong. Every 'big box store' that I've visited has had at least one and often several Blu Ray players hooked up to HDTV's. REALLY????!!! Where? All the ones around here are all hooked up and slaved off the same crappy source. I haven't seen a single big box store (outside of the "Magnolia" boutique at a Best Buy in San Antonio) actually hook up to a digital source using composite video (let alone the HDMI!).

Oh wait, you said "at least one". My bad. But still, I would expect pretty much EVERY hd tv they have there to be hooked up to a digital source, using digital connections...but then again, people buy the stuff anyway, so why bother?

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Zironic]

I'd say the blu-ray sales have gone up, way up is an overstatement since their market share is still rather low compared to it's main competitor, the DVD.

Going offtopic about Apple.

Stock prices are very different from sales and market share since all you really care about when it comes to stock is the relative value, going up 1800% is enough to make people really really rich. However saying your sales went up with 350% doesn't mean anything by itself, you can still be making a loss and you can still have a pathetic market share.

Also about Apple's stock, I'm very unsure if you can take that and say it shows shifting trends in personal computing. Doesn't most of Apples income come from iPod, iPhone and iTunes at this point? Their market share in personal computing is still abysmal.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[stewbacca]

Apple is what, around 10% of personal computing now (not sure the exact numbers). Name a major automobile manufacturer that enjoys even a 5% market share.

I'm pretty sure ANY company would accept an "abysmal" 10% market share.

Blu-ray players HAVE gone way up, and will continue to, since they are now the ONLY player in their niche of the market...HD playback. PS3 alone has shot up only AFTER the HD war ended. As an owner, I can say for certain the PS3 increase has not been due to the release of some must have game (still waiting there). I can't say for sure on other Blu-ray players, but my PS3 is also a very good DVD player, so I don't see how you think Blu-ray is in competition with DVD, since it does both. It really is NO competition, in my book.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[samkass]

Since the point I was making was refuting a simple "is it going down or is it going up?" and someone else suggested I needed some sort of source for my claim that it was going up, and I provided that source in response to that poster, I don't understand your objection. If my claim had been that Blu-Ray was overtaking DVD or that it was going mainstream I could see your point. It wasn't. It was simply refuting the parent poster's assertion that Blu-Ray sales are tanking since it "won".

And... journalism? You must be new here.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[engun]

True. Prices have certainly dropped, but not every country sells electronics as cheap as in the U.S. The prices are usually double that here in Australia.
The cheapest 32" HDTV I could find still costs over $1000.
A blu-ray player costs $500+.
(AUD and USD are more or less equal these days)

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[SenseiLeNoir]

Oh, and i forgot, the PS3 also Runs Linux (officially, no need to hack), plus a normal USB keyboard (or a bluetooth one if you have one)

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[SenseiLeNoir]

Oblig Slashdot Anechdote:

The PS3 also runs Linux! (officially, no need to hack), Officall Sony Supported Distro is Yellow Dog, but there are versions of Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian.
Easy upgrade of HD with 2.5 SATA drives (without messing your warrenty)
Add a normal USB keyboard, and mouse (or use a bluetooth one, if you prefer)

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Zironic]

>Name a major automobile manufacturer that enjoys even a 5% market share.

2004 data in the US:
Ford: 18.5%
GM: 26.9%
Chrysler: 13.5%

You might have wanted to pick a market that isn't dominated by mega-corporations.

>I can't say for sure on other Blu-ray players, but my PS3 is also a very good DVD player, so I don't see how you think Blu-ray is
>in competition with DVD, since it does both. It really is NO competition, in my book.

It's still competing against DVD. When someone goes to a store deciding what movie player he wants to have the decision will be between a cheap DVD player or an expensive blu-ray player. For quite a lot of people blu-ray just doesn't offer enough of an visual upgrade to be worth the price, most people's televisions don't even support Full HD (like mine).

I don't think it'll be able to beat DVD's and DVD players in market share until it can compete in price and that still looks to be far far away. It really wouldn't surprise me if in the meantime someone invents a cheaper, more durable and faster/larger format and blu-ray will end up being a mostly skipped generation.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[stewbacca]

And I could say that Toyota Prius owns a ridiculously exaggerated market share in my market of choice to support my argument too, but I won't. There's more to the world than the good ol' USofA (considering we have the worst taste in vehicles in the world, there's no wonder the big 3 have nice market share in the US....in the US). What's the Ford F-150s market share in, oh, say, the UK? How's about the Chevy Malibu doing in Germany? But getting back ON topic...

most people's televisions don't even support Full HD (like mine). Which is exactly why the Blu-ray player is not direct competition to DVD players. Those who don't think Blu-ray is a visual upgrade have no need for an HD tv then anyway since the quality is obviously lost on them in the first place. The lack of HD tvs in homes is what is keeping Blu-ray sales down, because the player is reliant on a TV that most people don't have yet.

I agree the players are expensive, and have gotten more expensive with the demise of competition. But, for that market segment that wants to spend more money on the best picture quality, Blu-ray is the only choice (since many "on-demand" and hd programming with cable are not full HD).

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[terjeber]

Oh, and look what I found. Blu-Ray sales have quadrupled. 400%. Does it hurt to be wrong all the time?

For new titles, according to the Redhill Group, Blu-Ray now typically hits 8-10% of the total number of disks sold. That is, when a new title is released for DVD and Blu-Ray simultaneously, the Blu-Ray/DVD split is about 10/90. That is significant growth. For catalog titles, the numbers are even better, Blu-Ray titles have hit up to almost 1/3 of the total sold.

All the time. Painful.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ergo98]

Hi there, idiot.

Given the fact that Warner already in early November (seemingly accidentally) made it clear that they were going to back Blu-Ray, and that they also apparently notified Toshiba about this in November

You are just completely full of shit. I think you spend a little too much time at Blu-ray fan clubs. The funny thing was that Warner came extremely close to signing a pact with HD-DVD just before CES, but HD-DVD balked at the price.

The fact that stand-alone Blu-Ray player sales have declined is neither unknown nor much of a surprise

What a load of shit. Suddenly the coast is clear and it's time to buy a player, and no one does. The "the PS3 is the player" argument is unbelievably dumb, because the majority of consumers don't look to game systems when they buy a media player.

On the other hand, you weren't talking about stand-alone player sales

Err, yeah, I was idiot, hence why I directly linked to a fucking article about player sales dropping, contrary to all expectations.

You're just a complete idiot, so blinded by your Blu-ray fanaticism that you can't see what's right in front of you. Honestly I'm just shocked, figuring that the Blu-ray fanclub would have disbanded after HD-DVD conceded, but now I've learned that people like you are still getting together and talking tough about Blu-ray. Amazing the things people will waste their time on.

You are an idiot. Don't reply again, as idiotic ramblings aren't necessary.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[sandmaninator]

Generally speaking, the purpose of the pictures on the screen is to convey a story. Does the higher resolution aid that?
My favorite shows are actually cartoons.

People get images at the limits of their perception just walking around with their eyes open.

On the other hand, something like the BBC Planet Earth series would be well served by higher resolution. Very pretty pictures. Still, that is a small clique.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[terjeber]

The funny thing was that Warner came extremely close to signing a pact with HD-DVD just before CES

This was reported in a number of forums and it was based on a significant misunderstanding. In early November TW told the HD-DVD guys that they were going to go with Blu. Tosh and MS then started courting TW, but they would not budge. On Thursday before CES, Toshiba and Microsoft asked for a meeting with TW, delaying the announcement that TW was going Blu. In the meeting TW was offered TW $500M in incentives (mostly marketing coverage and reduced production cost) to go HD-DVD exclusive, but TW said no thanks.

The fact that a TW executive let it slip that they were going with Blue already in November is well documented, and TW had to paddle quite a bit not to make this an official announcement.

Suddenly the coast is clear and it's time to buy a player, and no one does

Well, you might have noticed that the economy is seriously in the shitter, or perhaps you haven't. I don't know whether you read news or not.

The "the PS3 is the player" argument is unbelievably dumb

Yeah, for someone who has mental blocks in place, sure. I am far from alone in owning a PS3 and zero PS3 games. The PS3 is a perfect home theater component, particularly when you couple it with something like TVersity. Given the number of TVersity downloads, I'd say it sells quite well as a home media system.

You're just a complete idiot

Nowhere near as dumb as you are. Blu-Ray sales have quadrupled in a year. In the first four months of this year more Blu-Ray media was sold than the entire last year. Given that you claim that PS3 users are not Blu-Ray users and that "nobody" is buying stand alone players, how do you explain the rather significant increase in Blu-Ray media sales? Are morons just buying Blu-Rays to piss you off?

As for fanatic, the only moron here who behaves like a raving lunatic, and therefore a likely fanatic, is you.

Don't reply again

Given that you only have posted bile clearly from a lunatic, answering your clueless piss is the only real option. Someone has to show to the sane people reading here, that you are a fanatic lunatic.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[ergo98]

This was reported in a number of forums

Most of us don't hang out on Blu-ray forums. I do recall a similar rumor, however, that TW was going to go HD-DVD exclusive. In other words it was all just bullshit. TW had no motivation to delay unless they really hadn't made up their mind.

Well, you might have noticed that the economy is seriously in the shitter, or perhaps you haven't.

Err, yeah, okay genius. Only consumer spending hasn't dropped at all. You're just full of shit again, spinning the world to fit your Blu-colored glasses.

Blu-Ray sales have quadrupled in a year

Almost entirely owing to I AM LEGEND. From very low to just low. Great.

Given that you claim that PS3 users are not Blu-Ray users

You make up stuff, twist reality, report nonsense from your Blu-Ray-4-EVA sites as "news", and now you're just putting words in my mouth.

Analysts expected Blu-ray standalone player sales to rise after it won, given that supposedly this would lift consumer confusion. No such thing happened. Simple as that, brainiac.

Given that you only have posted bile clearly from a lunatic

Sure thing, fanatic. Keep on making sweet love to your PS3.

Ridiculous. You and your ilk are the noisy annoyance of the tech world, grappling onto something and barking away. Holy shit is it boring.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[terjeber]

W had no motivation to delay unless they really hadn't made up their mind.

Ah, but again you are just showing that you argue based on your religious hallucinations, not fact. TW was contractually obliged to produce HD-DVDs until April of 2008. If they had announced in September, when the decision was made, that they were going Blu exclusive, they would have damaged their own business.

Almost entirely owing to I AM LEGEND. From very low to just low. Great.

Yeah, so when catalog titles capture sells 72/28 DVD/Blu, then that is nothing. Were you born clueless or did someone hit you over the head with a hammer throughout your childhood?

But hey, keep posting your religious hallucinations. They are almost entertaining, in the same way monkeys in a zoo are entertaining.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[dangitman]

Generally speaking, the purpose of the pictures on the screen is to convey a story. Does the higher resolution aid that?

Well, it depends on the story. Film is not just a story-telling medium, it's also a medium of visual art. If it were just about the story, then radio plays and books would still be the dominant media.

Take the films of someone like Kubrick - while they are great stories even on a low-resolution screen, they are also breathtaking works of visual art when seen in their intended form.

Re:What Happened When HD-DVD Gave Up

[Lost Race]

Yes, they are cheaper, but their selection is very limited, usually just one or two brands in each category.

Details

[whisper_jeff]

...but there's not a lot of details.

Which, of course, means it's a perfect candidate for a Slashdot article...

Re:Details

[OrangeTide]

Luckily I don't read the linked article. I already have plenty opinions without resorting to that!

Re:Details

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the summary wrong as well? If so then it be perfect for /.

The REAL Question...

[FurtiveGlancer]

Will it run on Linux?

More like, "Who's going to write a backward compatible driver for yet another standard?"

Really, what's the use?

[cp.tar]

DVDs are way more sensitive to damage than CDs, which were not that robust in the first place. It seems to me that every new optical format will be progressively more sensitive to scratches and other kinds of surface damage/warping.

While my need for high-capacity data storage is ever-growing, just like everybody else's, I don't put much hope into optical media anymore.
I just buy a new hard drive, swap it out and put stuff on it.
It's faster, more reliable and takes up less space. It's just a bit less portable, is all.

The only way I'm getting a Blu-Ray or any other contender format, current or future, is if my new laptop comes with a compatible drive. Otherwise... I don't really care, and I doubt it that I ever will.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[cosinezero]

"DVDs are way more sensitive to damage than CDs, which were not that robust in the first place."

-->I keep hearing this from people... do you all not remember magnetic tape?

CDs and DVDs are virtually invincable, compared to VHS and cassette that they replace. And really, if you take care of it, it is quite robust.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[cp.tar]

CDs and DVDs are virtually invincable, compared to VHS and cassette that they replace. And really, if you take care of it, it is quite robust.

As robust and durable as a HDD?

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Arccot]

CDs and DVDs are virtually invincable, compared to VHS and cassette that they replace. And really, if you take care of it, it is quite robust.

As robust and durable as a HDD?

I drop cds and dvds all the time. A standard hard drive wouldn't be able to take that kind of punishment. Even portable HDs just aren't all that durable.

Personally, I think flash storage may be the best way to store portable data in all formats, if the price can ever get low enough.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[bloodninja]

DVDs are way more sensitive to damage than CDs, which were not that robust in the first place. What? The data layer of a dvd is in the middle, protected by 6mm of plastic on both sides that you can scratch all you want and then repolish. The data layer of a CD is on the outside (non-playback) edge, protected by a layer of paint. DVDs are much hardier than CDs.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[jedidiah]

CD and DVDs are certainly not "virtually invincable".

Furthermore, both formats are EXPOSED.

At least the magnetic media formats are put in protective casings.

This ends up making a lot of difference. DVD's would be much
less prone to damage if this "invincable" myth hadn't started.

I replace my DVD's in the car on a regular basis due to this "invincibility".

Take a sharp turn, watch the DVD's fly around the car, hear them skip afterwards.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[bilbravo]

6mm on each side? Really?

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Anonymous Coward]

It can withstand magnets and power surges, so yeah...as robust as a HDD

Re:Really, what's the use?

[bloodninja]

6mm on each side? Really? No, 0.6mm. Sorry.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Galactic Dominator]

My PS3 games have proven to be much more reliable than my 360 ones...although that could have something to with the PS3 not grinding on my discs the way the 360 did. I'll try again when my 360 gets back from another servicing.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[ColdWetDog]

Take a sharp turn, watch the DVD's fly around the car, hear them skip afterwards.

Tossing around your backup media is never a good strategy. Do you do this to your hard drives? Your tapes?

Oh, and if you don't have a station wagon, it's not really a backup.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[TheGratefulNet]

DVDs are way more sensitive to damage than CDs

you are actually wrong. I once took your position but I was proven wrong by a colleague.

the dvd format actually IS more robust and there is more error correction in there. take the time to look it up (I don't have the link handy).

it seems wrong but its actually correct. even though dvd is more dense, they DID do a better job on error detection/correction.

I still would not trust an opto format for longer term data storage. but if I had to choose, I'd choose a dvd to store my data instead of cd.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[cozziewozzie]

DVDs are way more sensitive to damage than CDs, which were not that robust in the first place. It seems to me that every new optical format will be progressively more sensitive to scratches and other kinds of surface damage/warping. 1. Make a sensitive product
2. Make backing up your movies/music/data illegal
3. Wait for the first scratch
4. ...
5. You have to buy that Disney movie your kids love so much over and over again.

It's a crappy business plan, IMHO, but it seems to be headed in that direction.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[blueg3]

They're not actually exposed. What's exposed is a relatively thick layer of plastic that the actual substrate is embedded in.

Fortunately there are protective casings readily and cheaply available for CDs and DVDs when they are not in use.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[adolf]

Blu-ray is more scratch-resistant than DVDs. There is a hard coating covering the important side of the disc, which is designed to resist scratching better than the polycarbonate plastic that the discs themselves (Blu-ray, DVD, and CD) are made of.

FYI, FWIW, etc.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[terjeber]

I just buy a new hard drive, swap it out and put stuff on it.

I have DVDs that are 10 years old or more. I have created about 50 different DVDs my self, they all have been playing fine when I have tried them, I haven't played the oldest ones in a while though.

Compare this to my HD experience. I have had three HDs god dead on me since August.

I fail to see how HD is a better backup medium than any of the optical media out there.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[UnrefinedLayman]

DVDs are way more sensitive to damage than CDs, which were not that robust in the first place. It seems to me that every new optical format will be progressively more sensitive to scratches and other kinds of surface damage/warping.

A Blu-Ray disk can be 50 GB in size. That's 429,496,729,600 bits of data. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty impressed that I can throw 429 billion individual pieces of data across the room like a frisbee, bounce it off the wall, then drop it in a player and still watch the movie on it. I can't do that with a VHS tape. Or a hard drive. Or a computer processor. I find that of low-entropy high-complexity items, optical media is pretty durable.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[OrangeTide]

mastered DVD and CD formats are very reliable (DVD especially). The writable media is far more variable in quality.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[muzicman]

I prefer 9mm.... Wait that is a different type of hardware.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that every new optical format will be progressively more sensitive to scratches and other kinds of surface damage/warping.

That is why they should only be read once, to get the data onto your hard disk. Optical disks are distribution media, not playback media. After one use, they go into the box never to be touched again unless your whole RAID dies.

Tape might work a little better and be more robust (or at least have a different set of problems; magnets instead of scratches), but would also cost more. It's pretty cool that they can press a disk containing so many gigabytes of data for under a dollar, and it's light enough to mail cheaply. That's some serious, cheap bandwidth. Beats the crap out of the internet too.

The problem with BluRay is that it isn't well-cracked yet, so the copy-to-HD part doesn't really work if you want to play the movie. So the tech isn't quite ready for use yet; they aren't quite ready to take your money. There's one proprietary Windows player that supposedly cracks BD+. When the crack gets widespread (and into FOSS) so that BluRay becomes universally usable, it will be pretty good tech. The studios just need to get information about how to defeat BD+ out there, so that people will be able to play the movies and therefore have an incentive to buy them instead of pirating.

Just be patient. This tech will kick ass and make both the studios and their customers very happy as soon as the DRM goes away.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Blu-Ray movies seem to be about as durable as DVDs. I've seen similar breakage rates, but I have yet to have to clean a Blu-Ray movie because of the anti-scratch coating.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[TravisO]

>> CDs and DVDs are virtually invincable, compared to VHS and cassette that they replace.

You obviously don't have children

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Nimey]

ISTR there was some sort of extremely durable coating that mitigated this, and that it was used on HD-DVDs but not Blu-Ray.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Anonymous Coward]

DVDs may be more sensitive to surface scratches on the "read" side, but DVDs also have an additional layer of polycarbonate on top of the data layer while CDs only have a thin laminate.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[HalAtWork]

Blu ray is pretty resistant to damage. I buy a lot of used PS3 games and there's never a problem you can't just wipe away and the discs look like new. HD-DVD did not have a mandatory highly protective coating, and while I never saw any, I know that DVDs can even get scuffed pretty easily and I'm impressed with the way the coating holds up on blu-ray. It makes the switch worth it alone.

As an aside, I see a lot of people talking about resolution, but the increase in dynamic range and color fidelity is what really sets it apart from DVD. DVDs look really muddy and blotchy in comparison, and there are a lot more motion artifacts as well.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[zippthorne]

If you scratch the plastic on a CD, you won't affect it's playability. Now, if you scratch the foil on the other hand...

why the hell didn't they think of sandwiching the foil between two polycarbonate disks, like in DVD, anyway?

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Hatta]

Magnetic tape is still the only way prudent people will back up important data. If you have a business critical database, you back it up on tape, not DVD. Magnetic tape will last decades, burnable DVDs, a few years. I wish we could get decent quality consumer tape drives for a reasonable price.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Anonymous Coward]

-->I keep hearing this from people... do you all not remember magnetic tape?

CDs and DVDs are virtually invincable, compared to VHS and cassette that they replace. And really, if you take care of it, it is quite robust. Bullshit. I've had a tape fail that I stepped on, and audio tape fail that I ran over. CDs and DVDs? Scratch it and you're typically screwed -- I can run 'em through cdparanoia or recover DVDs with a combination of dd, ffmpeg, and mencoder (depending on what's wrong) but players have this tendency to just plain crap out with a single easy scratch. I'm not going to claim VHS is better or anything, it certainly isn't, but CDs and DVDs are FAR more fragile.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people say this, but I have never lost a tape to that sort of thing ever,the quality degrades slightly over time, but it's quite difficult to damage a VCR tape.

CDs and DVDs OTOH are quite easy to scratch up, and if you're taking care of them like most unenlightened, chances are they're going to be sitting around without a case as often as not.

And unlike CDs/DVDs just because you get some damage doesn't mean that you lose all of it, discs may or may not play right after being damaged depending upon where the damage occurs and whether there's still error correction for that part of the disc.

I don't have many problems with Netflix discs, but I've never had a tape that utterly refused to play due to previous damage.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[LordVader717]

No, they're not exposed. A Thick layer of polycarbonate protects the data layer. To read it, light passes through this dielectric material uhindered.
By contrast, magnetic media needs near-contact with the reading head, so it needs to be relatively exposed. This necessitates some kind of additional shell.

Why not just put your DVDs in one of those handy little storage boxes between the drivers seat and passenger?

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, he clearly meant to write 0.6mm, not 6mm. Minor quibbles aside, he does raise some valid points about the durability of DVD vs. CD.

Blu-ray is probably even better, though, because the platters are hard-coated. They could hard-coat DVDs, but nobody wants to add the expense. It's pretty much required for Blu-ray, but it also does provide better protection in practice than 0.6mm of polycarbonate does.

(Although that whole "steel wool" demonstration is pretty much B.S. Almost any optical format has enough forward error correction built in to survive that level of scratching, and the transmission layer is clearly scratched extensively.)

Re:Really, what's the use?

[adolf]

CDs use forward error correction which is supposed to be able to accommodate a scratch of up to 1mm width, by design. It wouldn't make a lick of difference which side the scratch were on, as long as there are no delamination or oxidation issues in the event of a label-side scratch. If it's less than 1mm, the error is totally correctable. All bets are off when there are multiple scratches near eachother, as from sandpaper.

I'm guessing they didn't do the sandwich thing on CDs because it's almost certainly a lot cheaper to spray some lacquer on one side of one disc at atmospheric pressure, than to try to glue two discs together under a vacuum. DVDs kind of fell into a sandwich configuration by default, since the format was intended to be double-sided from the beginning.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Miguelito]

5. You have to buy that Disney movie your kids love so much over and over again. Better buy a couple copies of that Disney movie before they "close the Disney vault," then. Gah! I HATE that marketing scheme they use for the older stuff.

This is one thing I like about Blu-ray.. the scratch protection. I've got just over 50 BD movies now (not that much for me, I'm way over 1000 DVDs) and I've yet to have a single issue with playback; I tend to be a klutz with discs drop them a lot. I have, however, had more then a few DVDs get scratched to the point of becoming unplayable... not to mention I've had both DVDs and HD-DVDs come out of the sealed box scratched beyond playability (stupid broken plastic hub in case).

Re:Really, what's the use?

[toddestan]

CDs and DVDs are virtually invincable, compared to VHS and cassette that they replace. And really, if you take care of it, it is quite robust.

My experience with renting movies is that VHS is far more durable. I can't remember ever getting a tape that won't play. Sure, it may have been really worn with a degraded picture and sound and I might have had to help the VCR with the tracking, but they always would play. DVDs? Not so much. I would get disks all the time that would not play, or would only play part way through, or were otherwise unwatchable. Some of these DVDs would look perfect given a visual inspection.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[cleatsupkeep]

6mm on each side? Really? It's the same to Verizon.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[syousef]

CDs and DVDs are virtually invincable, compared to VHS and cassette that they replace. And really, if you take care of it, it is quite robust.

Based on personal experience that's total BS. I have 20 year old VHS tapes that are crap but still playable. I also have 5 year old burnt DVDs that are unreadable despite being stored properly.

Re:Really, what's the use?

[Prune]

I always wonder why optical disks don't use floppy-style cartridges. Then you wouldn't need jewel boxes AND your medium is protected. If I remember correctly, minidisks used such a system.

Note to Hillary and Toshiba

[SputnikPanic]

It's over. Move on.

Re:Note to Hillary and Toshiba

[Anonymous Coward]

It's over. Move on. You do realize that Move On was formed to keep Clinton in power, right?

Re:Note to Hillary and Toshiba

[Anonymous Coward]

Source?

Re:Note to Hillary and Toshiba

[R2.0]

Hey, here's a question - Who is Moveon.org supporting?

Re:Note to Hillary and Toshiba

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that Move On was formed to keep Clinton in power, right? Well, really it was founded to close the Clinton impeachment trial. They proposed a plan to congressional censor the President, and 'move on' with the country's business. Really it represented the first liberal response to the permanent campaign tactics, which the Republican party adapted in the 90's.

Re:Note to Hillary and Toshiba

[Anonymous Coward]

Not Clinton.

Re:Note to Hillary and Toshiba

[CodeBuster]

.org

About time

[Erich]

You can easily fit HD video on DVD media using H.264 compression. The only reason you need the storage of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray is if you:

1. Want to force customers to buy new, expensive players instead of minor DSP/Firmware upgrades to existing player designs
2. Want to force customers to have a difficult time making their own HD media because Blu-Ray writable media and burners are too expensive.
3. Believe that by making the size larger that pirates can't figure out how to transcode to a smaller formant before posting on the internet (and that 30G images are too big to download)
4. Want to be able to ship many movies on a single disc... but that doesn't seem to be happening

The companies could have come up with a new format using better compression. Players would be marginally more expensive because of increased decode processing, but in general I think you'd see $30 DVD players become $35 DVD/HD players very fast because of the very marginal increase in capabilities needed.

Oh well.

Re:About time

[stormguard2099]

Great points. People are drawn to the latest and greatest of technology but I think Blu-ray is just a bit too expensive to take advantage of this. The leap is just too far to justify it in the minds of most people. I think an increase in quality for a slight increase in price might be able to hit a sweet spot that more consumers would be willing to go for that otherwise would just stick with standard dvds.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

You can easily fit HD video on DVD media using H.264 compression. The only reason you need the storage of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray is if you:

1) Want to include a higher bitrate encoding so that banding/compression artifacts are kept to a minimum
2) Want to include lossless audio

I've downloaded several movies that have been recompressed to DVD5/DVD9, and though they look pretty good, they still exhibit signs that they've been recompressed. In many cases, they're better than what you'd get via HD cable or satellite, but compared to the original HD disc source (be it HDDVD or BD), they don't hold a candle.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Bollocks Those H.264 "HD" movies you download at 720p are pretty crap on big screens. 1080p rips rarely fit DVD9, so you're out their too. Just because pirates like you may be happy with so-called HD rips with crap audio, plenty of others aren't or cannot be bothered.

There's also fsck all on the market that plays these matroska files you pirate. Most people do not what a big noisy energy sucking HTPC anywhere near their HDTV.

Re:About time

[Silverlancer]

Blu-ray discs already *use* H.264 (usually; some use VC-1). They just use absurdly high bitrates to compensate (partially) for the fact that the encoders they use are extremely inefficient.

Re:About time

[evilviper]

You can easily fit HD video on DVD media using H.264 compression.

You can easily fit ANY resolution video, on ANY sized media, using ANY lossy codec. You can have HD video on a floppy disk using MPEG-1.

With lossy codecs, the lower the bitrate, the more visual information will be discarded (quantized) to make it fit the available bitrate. There's no magic that will wipe away the 5X increase in storage size that Blu-ray has over DVD. Highdef on DVD will simply look less detailed (more smooth), with the appearance of more compression artifacts like color banding.

Re:About time

[terjeber]

You can easily fit HD video on DVD media using H.264 compression

Bzzzt! Wrong! Of course you can't. You don't need 25 or 50G to encode, but you can not encode an HD movie onto a standard DVD with any known or theoretically envisioned codec. 90 minutes of video encoded at 15Mb/s would not fit on a dual layer DVD and 15Mb/s would yield a very poor quality HD result. Good quality HD requires 20-25Mb/s bitrate, which would require media storing 15G or more.

The companies could have come up with a new format using better compression

Please enlighten us oh-wise-one, what encoders would that be, and how would they encode three times better than H.264 or VC-1? Also, if they existed, how would players decode them in real time without adding massively more expensive hardware to the mix?

Re:About time

[jedidiah]

Bullocks yourself.

Even an MPEG2 movie at 480 looks fairly spectacular on a large screen. The key difference
here is that you are getting a pristine version of a movie that's been mastered by a pro
and not just some quick hack thrown together with a few default options from some bit of
consumer grade desktop software.

h264 mastered onto a dual layer DVD by the studio would impress all but the most obstinate snob.

Re:About time

[Wdomburg]

At least some of the lackluster quality there would be from the recompression itself. You would need a fresh compression from a lossless master to make a fair comparison.

Still, I agree that DVD9 is a tight fit, particularly in regard to longer titles or particularly feature-laden releases (though it seems two-disc releases are likely to be used for HD even when unnecessary for reasons of percieved value). Lossless audio has always struck me as more a marketing gimmic than anything else, but the greater range of codecs supported in the new standards do represent a functional improvement.

(I personally think HD30 was plenty and it strikes me as daft that Warner chose the more expensive format while economists were debating whether we were about to go into a recession or had already slipped into one, but that's another debate. :)

Re:About time

[Wdomburg]

About 42% are H.264, 30% MPEG2, 28% VC-1.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you fit HD video on DVD using H.264? Yes. Easily? Maybe not so much.

For reference, I'm looking at the LXG Blu-ray, whose video is coded in H.264. The main video is 18 GB.

So unless you either want to reduce the bitrate versus what's on the Blu-ray, you would need to resort to multiple disks. I would say that significantly degrades the movie watching experience.

Re:About time

[TheGratefulNet]

You can easily fit HD video on DVD media using H.264 compression.

I just did this experiment for the first time (for me). my HTPC, so far, has been playing ONLY ripped dvd's and OTA HDtv.

my player does upscaling (its a 'popcorn hour' box; which uses a sigma designs (fanless) chip in a streamer type set-top appliance.

anyway, I wanted to see how good h264 is. I don't own any of the HD opto players (I never will; I disapprove of their very design (drm) so I won't ever buy them. not ever. any money I'd spend would only encourage them with my dollar-voting so I refrain from buying or even renting any HDDVD or BD items). but I did download a torrent to see what all the fuss was about. got a classic 'demo' movie - the 5th element. (that seems to be a popular demo .mkv from what I can tell).

the file was 4gig (or thereabouts) and it looked a LOT better than even my nicely upscaled dvd's. in fact, it had better motion compression than even the OTA kqed-hd shows that I tend to 'tape' and watch.

this was half the size of a dvd9 disc. and it looked WAY better than dvd, it was probably about 95% of what the original BD disc looked like yet there was NO drm and it 'fit' JUST FINE on a dvd if I wanted to write the raw .mkv file there.

therefore, the 30gig (etc) filesizes ARE A SCAM. you don't need that much room and you don't WANT that much room 'just for movies'. I have a multi terabyte NAS at home but still, why waste space on movies when you can get the same look/feel for about 1/10 the space needs.

even compressing a dvd9 in mpeg1 to .mkv using h264 yielded a 50% reduction in space.

clearly, the only reason a new disc was invented was to LOCK IN dumb consumers who don't realize that they've been scammed and oversold tech that isn't much better than 10:1 compression that is commonly available ('handbrake' etc) today.

its offensive that the industry tries to make the files SO LARGE that its not as economical to store them in a NAS. that, of course, was the other unmentioned agends in the HD/BD camps. I'm sure they fully knew that they over-did the data rate but their goal was to stop pirating and 'format conversion' to home NAS systems and the like. of course with 'anydvd' (slysoft.com) there is now no longer any real 'protection' on the HD opto formats. and the fact that I watched a digitally extracted BD title on my non-encrypted playback system (and not even an HDCP display, either) means that the industry has basically spent a lot of money on a failed protection scheme.

once more and more consumers realize how GOOD upscaled dvd's can look (if they are anamorphic 16x9 at least) then the sales of BD will actually decline. only 'have to have it' geeks end up getting BD/HD discs. the rest of us are still refusing to buy into this, for the reasons I just mentioned.

Re:About time

[Galactic Dominator]

480 looks barely adequate on my 65", regardless of who mastered it. Even when I play professionally mastered DVD's on it and it's upscaled to 1080p, it's still a bit rough. I have the Life of Brian on DVD, and my brother has the blueray version. You'd have to have serious vision impairment not to be able discern the difference in quality(although as an aside the differences between 1080i and 1080p are only in marketing and technological approaches - visual is a wash). That's the nature of video, you can't overcome it with bluster. Your example is bullocks, however I do agree with your last point.

Re:About time

[Charlie Kane]

Bullocks yourself. Even an MPEG2 movie at 480 looks fairly spectacular on a large screen.... h264 mastered onto a dual layer DVD by the studio would impress all but the most obstinate snob. Well then, obstinate snobs unite! I mean, I agree that 480p DVDs can look pretty good on a large screen. But "spectacular?" I shudder. As a longtime movie buff who's logged many hours watching 16mm, 35mm and 70mm prints, my worst fear is that people who know and understand very little about the characteristic of a 35mm film image will eventually determine the direction of the market for HD video. We already have studios compromising the quality of full-bandwidth Blu-ray discs by over-zealously noise-reducing and then "sharpening" the image to appeal to a certain type of home-theater geek that wants everything glossy and grain free. The last thing we need is a movement toward applying even more aggressive manipulation and filtering to the film image before cramming it into an even more highly compressed, and highly compromised, video version. If it takes snobs to keep that from happening, well for the love of god bring on the snobs!

Re:About time

[halcyon1234]

Want to be able to ship many movies on a single disc... but that doesn't seem to be happening

Yeah, that's not ever happening until there's some serious housecleaning in the marketing department.

Masters of Horror was a series that was 13 1-hour episodes. Each episode was a different anthology-esque tale told by a different horror movie director. Because it was so diverse, not every fan liked the same episodes. But they liked the series overall. The 13th episode was ultra violent, and was either never aired (or heavily censored), creating a huge demand for that episode

The market is primed to release the season on DVD, including the "banned" episode. The fans had pretty much unanimously said that they'd buy it for that episode, plus their two or three "favorite" episodes, and to have the entire season.

Instead, marketing splits it up into single or double episode DVDs, pricing them at over $20 each. And they don't release the "banned" episode (or only release it censored

Fans DON'T buy the DVD, and make their motives clear. They'd have to buy 2-3 discs for $60 just to get the episodes they really want. They were expecting to spend $40-$55 on an entire season of 13 episodes, inline with other shows. The episode they really wanted isn't available. The DVD sales are dismal, and you can find the series in the 2/$5 at most video stores

Here comes the victor in the HD wars. BlueRay. Alright, let's get these movie-quality episodes out in HD. There's still a huge demand for it, after all.

What happens? Season 1 is released in FOUR VOLUMES! 3 episodes per disc, and close to $40 each. And they're again split up in such a way that most fans would have to buy 2 or 3 of them to get all their wanted episodes.

Even putting aside the insanity of releasing in parts when it epic-failed before-- they're putting less than 3 hours of SD quality footage on one high-capacity disc. You can practically HEAR the empty, wasted space. The entire season would have fit handsomely on one or two BlueRay discs, which could have been sold in a single package to the hungry fans. But it didn't happen. The series will go unbought-- and there's 2-3 times as much wasted packaging and plastic hanging around.

So until marketing execs can be convinced that "Season 1 vol 1" is a bankruptable offense, getting "Hellraiser: The Complete Collection" on a single BlueRay ain't happening.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah but he said "easily fit HD video" not "easily fit HR video". Save your anal comment about lossy codecs for when it really applies.

Re:About time

[terjeber]

h264 mastered onto a dual layer DVD by the studio would impress all but the most obstinate snob.

Absolutely. That is, until he saw a 1080p movie in it's original aspect ration (wider than 16x9 for most of them) and compared. 480p at an aspect ratio of 2.31:1 is what, 400 scan lines for the movie it self? 380?

I hope you get your eyes fixed soon.

Re:About time

[Zakabog]

1. Want to force customers to buy new, expensive players instead of minor DSP/Firmware upgrades to existing player designs

How expensive were DVD players when they first came out? What about DVD burners? You think Blu-Ray is going to be expensive forever?

2. Want to force customers to have a difficult time making their own HD media because Blu-Ray writable media and burners are too expensive.

Yes, because we all know if it's expensive technology now it will be expensive technology forever! Just look at the CD-ROM drive, just the other day I saw a 2x CD-ROM drive for $400! It did come with a fancy new SoundBlaster sound card (ISA), which my $3,000 IBM PS/2 lacks, but still, CD-ROM drives are far too expensive for the average person to ever afford. Although the same could be said for computers. [/sarcasm]

3. Believe that by making the size larger that pirates can't figure out how to transcode to a smaller formant before posting on the internet (and that 30G images are too big to download)

Yeah the 30 gig movie file is all padding, and compressing it down to 4 gigs does not degrade the picture or audio quality. Plus with high speed internet being so widely available, and massive hard drives being so cheap, it'd be impossible for pirates to download 30 gig movies.

4. Want to be able to ship many movies on a single disc... but that doesn't seem to be happening

Why would I buy a blu-ray disc for 10 DVD quality movies?

From your post I assume you're either too young to know how the whole system works (new technology = expensive at first) or you don't own a blu-ray player and a TV capable of showing you how nice the image really looks. I watched Lord of the Rings on my PS3 and my 56" TV, this was right after seeing my first blu-ray movie. The difference in quality between DVD and Blu-Ray is incredible. It's something you really have to see with your own eyes. Eventually when blu-ray comes down in price just like every other piece of new technology in history, you'll go down to Walmart and buy a $30 blu-ray player with some discount $5 blu-ray movies and see what all the fuss is about.

Re:About time

[Terrasque]

There are a lot of naysayers about the video quality of a blueray compressed to 4gb in h264 format by "amateurs" as one comment called them..

Here is a screenshot from Spiderman 2 Blueray rip (You have to click the image to see full resolution), compressed to 4.37 gb (normal dvd size). As you see, the quality is quite good. And this is, as said, 4gb for the whole movie. Dual layer DVD can store 8 gb.

I was a video nerd earlier, and I have developed a good eye for compression artifacts, but I really really rarely see them on HD rips (when done well). The colors are sharp, no blocks even with lots of movement, the only thing I sometimes notice is that smooth color transitions sometimes are broken up (think the sky going from dark blue to black for example). To be honest, I see more comression artifacts on normal DVD's than I do on HD rips.

And now, when you have something to compare, please continue the discussion :)

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Your assumption is that all codecs are created equal, i.e. that H.264 at a lower bitrate will look worse than MPEG-2. The parent's comment is that the compression has gotten better.

Re:About time

[Jeremy Erwin]

1080p only matters if you have a screen that can display it, and the screen is large enough that you can actually see the difference.

Of course, if your compression algorithm is overly aggressive, resolution is the least of your concerns,

Re:About time

[Jeremy Erwin]

Yeah the 30 gig movie file is all padding, and compressing it down to 4 gigs does not degrade the picture or audio quality.

Increasing the bitrate beyond a certain point brings diminishing returns.

Re:About time

[IronChef]

Highdef on DVD will simply look less detailed (more smooth), with the appearance of more compression artifacts like color banding.

That IS true, but I think the GP poster was trying to say, "you can fit a surprisingly good HD movie into the space available on a DVD using a good codec." I agree.

4 GB of h.264 can look pretty good. I've never seen a BD rip crammed into the space of a double-layer DVD, but I can imagine that would look much better, and easily good enough for most people.

As good as BR/HDDVD? Well, no! I've got a bigass 1080p and I know exactly what that looks like, as well as what two CD's worth of h.264 gets you. But I'd have compromised to end the format war early, and get cheaper media prices, if it had been up to me. HD on DVD was not a bad idea as an interim measure.

Instead... after a long and bloody war, we got BR. Technically it neat-o, but in practice it's stumbled with nonsense like players that can't be upgraded to the high end of the spec.

The whole affair was... regrettable.

Re:About time

[gEvil (beta)]

Increasing the bitrate beyond a certain point brings diminishing returns.

Quite true. But for 1080p video encoded with either H.264 or VC-1, the resulting filesize (for an average length movie) is generally in the 20-25GB range. Taking it above that doesn't yield much better results. Taking it below that begins to compromise the video quality.

Re:About time

[Erich]

I'm talking about H.264. That's about as good as it gets right now, but it's pretty darn good. Turn on all the bells and whistles -- a large ME window, B-frames, CABAC -- and you get really really good compression, beautiful video at 25-30% of the bit rate of MPEG2. At least from my experience. Maybe I'm not a Motion Picture Expert.

A single sided DVD can hold roughly 8G of data.

That's roughly 10 megabits average for a 120 minute movie

10 megabits Average Bit Rate looks quite good for 24-30 fps @720p. I haven't tried the same clip at 24-30fps @1080p, which is somewhere north of 2x the number of pixels. Maybe it's not so great... but given the quality at 5Mbps @720p, I would imagine I would enjoy the movie.

Heck, OTA uses not too much more bit rate, and it's MPEG2.

Re:About time

[TheSync]

You can easily fit HD video on DVD media using H.264 compression.

It depends which definition of "HD" and "DVD" you mean...

Today's Blu-ray's are encoded with H.264 around 25 Mbps yielding 28 GB for a 2.5 hour movie. I personally think this might be a bit of overkill, the broadcast world feels pretty happy about 12 to 15 Mbps H.264 for HD.

To fit onto a single-sided, double-layer 8.5 GB DVD, your bitrate would need to be around 7.5 Mbps, which is what I call "pretty crappy" HD.

A double-sided, double-layer 15 GB DVD would get you to the 15 Mbps department for a 2.5 hour movie, acceptable to broadcasters, but below what the cinema-oriented people want for H.264 optical media.

Re:About time

[zippthorne]

Are you comparing movies in 1080i/p or stuff that's actually shot for the format?

'cause at the academy rate of ~24 fps, 1080p24 is the same bandwidth as 1080i. If you encode it as p60, you're just going to end up with a lot of duplicated frames.

I've yet to see anything shot for p60, btw, so I've no idea if it's a wash or not. Also, I've been *extremely* disappointed with the blu-ray disks i've seen in the stores. Lots of noise, and when there isn't noise, compression artifacts out the wazoo. Even CGI films. (yes, I specifically asked for a blu-ray player to be connected to a 1080p screen, and when the movie they picked had way too much film grain to tell anything, I waited while they hunted down a more appropriate film. Humorously, both films opened with shots of a standard-definition television set with exaggerated scan lines) I think blu-ray might be a "transition" format. real HD either requires more bandwidth, better compression algorithms, or less stupid technicians.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the HD/Blu Ray rippers who are rescaling to 720p at 4.7GB or 1080p at twice that...

Re:About time

[Jeremy Erwin]

Like I said, diminishing returns. A 25 gigabyte file looks slightly better than a 12 gigabyte file, which looks slightly better than a 4 gigabyte file. The better your display, and the more controlled your viewing environment, the greater the chance that you'll actually notice those differences.

For instance, my HDTV has poor black levels, It's also small enough that I'm just able to appreciate the difference between a 480i DVD of "Lost" and a 720p broadcast of Lost. (my DVD player is quite good).

I'm not going to be able to tell the difference between a 1080p encode and a 720p encode. I'm also not going to tell the difference between encodes if the only difference is to clear up some video noise in dark scenes.

On the other hand, if I ever start an HD media collection, I'm going to want pristine, error free discs that will look good on any HD displays that I might buy 2--3 years down the road.

Re:About time

[terjeber]

I'm talking about H.264. That's about as good as it gets right now

I agree that H.264 is as good as it gets and I am in strong disagreement with you on the quality possible at 10Mb/s. I regularly encode video in H.264 for my PS3 on AVCHD. For me, at 720p, 15M gives a decent result for 720p. For 1080p at 24fps which is my alternative encoding, 15Mb/s doesn't cut it, and I have to go to 22-25. Most HD movies today are 1080p, and encoding that at 10Mb/s for a DVD would yield unacceptable results. I have, for example, a concert video encoded at 10Mb/s, a short snipped, and banding is a very visible problem. On the 25Mb/s 1080p encoding there is no banding.

So, my experience, both in watching trailers for commercial movies at lower bandwithd, and encoding my self to H.264, tells me that your assertion that 8G is enough for HD movies is utterly wrong.

Now, we have not even started talking about 2 hour movies, uncompressed sound and extras.

Again, your assertion that a new media format was not needed for this improved visual and audio experience is provably wrong.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm I work in this field (set top box design) and I can tell you you can compress anything into any space you want. Marketing supply the 'format' and the beancounters supply the pipe - you do what it takes to make it fit.

Monikers like '1080i' mean absolutely nothing in terms of picture quality - the only thing that really matters is the bitrate.

Since 'HD' is generally defined by the resolution, not the bitrate, you get (in fact, it's the norm now) 1080i HD broadcasts in Europe/Asia/Oz that are poorer subjective quality than the analogue PAL we're used to. Obviously in the US HD looks quite good because you put up with NTSC for so long, but you're in the minority there.

It's yet another triumph of marketing, I'm afraid.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

You can easily fit ANY resolution video, on ANY sized media, using ANY lossy codec.

While this is true, the media must still support transferring the data at a bitrate that allows the video to play in real time. Otherwise, the video can't be played without extensive buffering. The HD video on a floppy fails at this whereas the DVD with H.264 doesn't.

That's the way I interpreted the GPs assertion...that you could put HD on a DVD and still have it be playable in real time.

Re:About time

[zippthorne]

Ok, movie buff..

Does 35 and 16mm film actually have enough data for 1080? Last time I went to the theater, it was not nearly as detailed as some of the home theaters I've seen (granted, comparing movies to OTA 1080p30 shows, so it's not like with like.)

And my gripe is just the opposite. Some movies are getting "flim grain" added to the picture. Presumably to make it more "gritty."

Re:About time

[Pieroxy]

I think what the GP said was that you can easily fit a 1:30 hour full hd movie in 9GB storage space at a quality level which would satisfy 99%+ of the public. Which is true.

At some point, more bitrate is just a waste. Look at DVD-A : Can anyone tell me on good faith that 192KHz 32 bit audio sound better than 96KHz 24-bit ? No one, because it is several orders of magnitude over whatever the ear can distinguish.

Likewise, anything over 15MBps (average, granted) is very very very very likely to be wasted bits. At least for full HD with a HC H.264 codec.

That said, you will always find people who like to think that bigger is better. While it is true when you think small, at some point, it becomes an annoyance ;-)

Re:About time

[UserChrisCanter4]

While most of you response is right (HD Video, even with h.264, doesn't look as good when squashed for DVD capacity), your bitrate numbers are off. ATSC transmission rates are allowed a maximum of 19.4 Mb/s, and most transmissions are, in practice lower than that.

And that's MPEG-2, the only accepted codec standard that I know of in ATSC land. H.264 is obviously much more efficient.

Again, I agree with you. A DVD is not enough space to keep away nasty artifacting and color banding, but your bitrate numbers are a bit extreme.

Re:About time

[molecularaz]

you my friend, obviously do not know what your talking about....when CODECS are concerned

Re:About time

[LordVader717]

I have Life of Brian on DVD too. A few years old. My freind has a remastered version of Life of Brian on DVD (With cardboard sppecial-edition box etc). You'd have to have a serious vision impairment not to be able discern the difference in quality.

Personally, interlaced content bugs me. Even with a good deinterlacer it's simply blurry and some of that horzontal jitter still seeps through despite all the filters you slap on.

Re:About time

[LordVader717]

Lol, I just used one of those films for testing playback of Bluray Rips on my PC to my HDTV. Can't even begin to imagine how many times I heard "Although each of the world's..."
Which is the other one btw.?

Re:About time

[LordVader717]

He's on about compressing HDTV Material (1080p would be possible) down to 9GB coded in AVC. Not quite the same as you understood.

Re:About time

[LordVader717]

Well most large screens sold do these days don't they? Whether you can see a difference depends on the relative screen size. If you sit at the optimal distance for your screen size, you'll see the diference.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

640x360 H.264 videos encoded at 1Mb/s looks very nice on my video projector when played with VLC from a 1.1GHz Pentium M laptop. With the same video quality per pixel that would translates 9Mb/s for 1920x1080 video or about 4GB/hour. So dual-layer DVD should be able to hold more than 2 hours of HD video.

Re:About time

[aibrahim]

Bzzzt! Wrong! Of course you can't. You don't need 25 or 50G to encode, but you can not encode an HD movie onto a standard DVD with any known or theoretically envisioned codec. 90 minutes of video encoded at 15Mb/s would not fit on a dual layer DVD and 15Mb/s would yield a very poor quality HD result. Good quality HD requires 20-25Mb/s bitrate, which would require media storing 15G or more.

Please enlighten us oh-wise-one, what encoders would that be, and how would they encode three times better than H.264 or VC-1? Also, if they existed, how would players decode them in real time without adding massively more expensive hardware to the mix?

Actually you are comically wrong.

You ask what encoder? How about h.264?

You really ought to head over to the Apple Movie Trailer site and check out their 1080p contents. They look fantastic. In most home theater set ups the quality is indistinguishable from Blue-Ray/HD-DVD until you hit pause and do a comparison.

Even in a 10bit studio setup with production monitors (I evaluated using Sony BVM-L230) or projectors the 9Mbit H.264's look good. The problems become apparent, but frankly the data format itself rivals many theaters projection quality. The main issue is excessive banding, then again the higher bitrate h.264 on Blue Ray et al. also exhibit this. They'd have to move to 10bit encoding and much higher data rates to eliminate it. (50Mbit/s at least, but I am guessing 100Mbit/s)

Here are the trailers for Batman: The Dark Night. Trailer 3 is 10.83Mbits/s at 1920x816 24 frames progressive. Trailer 2 is 10.48Mbit/s. There are plenty of other trailers ranging from 8Mbit/s to about 11Mbit/s

Judge for yourself.

Re:About time

[LordVader717]

The Audio is usually a directly copied 5.1 DTS stream. That's more than most Bluray customers bother to get out of their players.

And those Matroska files can easily be muxed into an AVI, so no problem there.

Re:About time

[LordVader717]

Well no, there are actually limits to lossy comprssion. In both ways. Try encoding using XVID and jacking up the bitrate and you'll see what codec saturation is. Alternatively you can manipulate the compression parameters and convince people it better quality cause it's "less compressed".
Kinda like how they introduced lossless 6-channel audio.

Re:About time

[Jeremy Erwin]

Sometimes HDTV sounds like a conspiracy to sell large screen TVs-- and that won't mesh well with a recession.

My TV is a mere 27". The proper viewing distance for a 1080p set of that size is approximately 3.5 ft, which is kind of cramped. It's 768p, which is more than enough.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

umm hello, your numbers are for an mpeg2 generation codec, he is talking an mpeg4 generation codec which are not available on any blue ray disks. you do not know what you are talking about. computers can do it easily, hardware makers do not want to spend the money to do any mpeg4 decoding at that resolution so that's why they are not available and that's why you have never heard of it and assume it's impossible. I don't know who moderated this insightful but you are factually wrong. 25Mb/s is for mpeg2 you do not need that much for any of the mpeg4 codecs, you cannot even compare it like that.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you can fit HD content onto a DVD. You can fit HD content onto a CD.

You just can't fit two hours of it onto either of those two media.

Re:About time

[terjeber]

The original assertion that I responded to was that DVD-9 was plenty of storage for HD video the way we know it today, which, given the fact that a good blu-ray is H.264 or VC-1 encoded at 25Mb/s or so, and lossless 5.1 HD-MA sound, is an absurd idea.

Re:About time

[terjeber]

You ask what encoder? How about h.264?

I regularly encode to, and watch content encoded in H.264. It is a codec, not magic. It needs a decent bitrate to produce a good image.

Apple Movie Trailer site and check out their 1080p contents. They look fantastic

Good idea, I haven't downloaded any of those for a while. I have downloaded the equivalent content from the Sony site accessible from the PS3 though. And yes, the content looks good, but a far cry from the higher bitrate originals.

The best example I have of those is the Shakira Oral Fixation tour example. The banding is, particularly in the beginning of the video, painfully obvious. I got the Blu-Ray from Netflix, and the banding is not there.

I am still trying to download the dark night trailer, but having some problems. I got the Prince Caspian trailer though, and even though the scenes are carefully chosen, and quite short, banding in particular is painfully obvious in several scenes on my big-screen TV. If the end movie was of the same quality as the trailer, it would be butchered for it's video quality in reviews. I am looking forward seeing the dark night trailer on my HD TV, but as of now I am unable do have QT download it properly. As always QT on the PC platform is a bloody nightmare.

Re:About time

[Squozen]

Agreed, 480P looks pretty average on my 92" screen...

And by the way, are you Americans trying to say 'bollocks'?

Re:About time

[kjots]

1080p is a luxury, not a necessity. If you ate fine food everyday of your life, imagine what the shit you're eating now would taste like.

Then there's the minor detail that the vast vast majority of all content currently only exists in standard definition or lesser quality (I'm taking television here - cinema is a cultural wasteland).

But then again, I'm watching SD with 576 lines, rather then 480. PAL 4 th win!

Re:About time

[LordVader717]

You really think you can tell the difference between lossless audio and DTS or AC3?

And if you truly think that they need all that storage on Bluray, I suggest you try reencoding a movie for yourself.

You can make a 480p MPEG-2 movie blow up to 30 GB too, it doesn't make it better.

Re:About time

[terjeber]

1080p is a luxury, not a necessity.

HD is luxory. 1080p is HD. There is no real point in moving to HD unless you move to 1080p and 42" or better.

Re:About time

[terjeber]

And if you truly think that they need all that storage on Bluray, I suggest you try reencoding a movie for yourself.

I don't think they need all that storage on Blu-Ray. I have encoded movies for my self though, and 10Mb/s for 1080p just doesn't cut it. That means that they do need more storage than you can get on a dual-layer DVD.

So, we are in a situation where DVD is too small, what do we do next? Limit our self to a 50% increase in DVD size or make it a little bigger? What is wrong with enabling more storage? I use my Blu-Ray burner also to store data. 50G is nice. Fits an entire HDV project with stock media and all. Before it is rendered. Perfect.

Re:About time

[evilviper]

at a quality level which would satisfy 99%+ of the public. Which is true.

It's not "true" in any sense. It's a completely subjective opinion, and there are NUMEROUS people just here on /. who will happily tell you they are NOT happy with a DVD-9 rip... I don't believe that remotely translates into < 1% of the populace at large.

Likewise, anything over 15MBps (average, granted) is very very very very likely to be wasted bits. At least for full HD with a HC H.264 codec.

That's simply not true in any objective sense. You might as well say going to highdef in the first place is "wasted bits".

With audio, we've been up to the limit of human hearing for decades, and have been using completely lossless formats. With video we aren't anywhere NEAR the limits of human vision, and use extremely aggressive lossy compression.

Re:About time

[evilviper]

Try encoding using XVID and jacking up the bitrate and you'll see what codec saturation is.

First, we're a LONG, LONG way from that point with highdef video.

Secondly, XVID has been designed with aggressive quantization, because it's primary purpose is low-bitrate encoding. Change the quantization tables, and lower the minimum frame-level quantizer, and you won't max out the codec until the video is absolutely lossless (**hand-waving away inherent rounding errors**).

Re:About time

[Qender]

Lol, perhaps they could use procedurally generated images, like demoscene videos... Now all we need to do is figure out how to write a program to generate season 3 of lost in C code using direct x and we're all set!

Re:About time

[Tekdemon]

Nonsense, H.264 is more than capable of storing full-length movies on a dual-layer DVD at 720P with very good quality. If you don't believe me go find a hardcore movie pirate who pirates HD movies (or just check a public bittorrent tracker and look at the file sizes), most 720P movies will fit on a DVD. 1080P movies would be pushing it on longer movies, but even then 90 minute movies would easily fit on one disc and look fantastic. If movie pirates can encode it so that it doesn't have significant artifacting and can fit onto a regular DVD, I have no doubt that Toshiba would be able to pull it off. As an example, the 1080P pirate of Casino Royale is a little over 12GB, but that's a 150 minute long movie. Now I'm not saying that it'll be videophile level video, but it'd be competitive in terms of quality with the downloadable HD movies available nowadays on iTunes and Xbox Live, and if people are willing to buy those maybe a cheap physical disc format that doesn't require downloading for hours and hours would actually work.

Re:About time

[terjeber]

Nonsense, H.264 is more than capable of storing full-length movies on a dual-layer DVD at 720P with very good quality.

The core of the matter here is the last part of your quote, namely the definition of "very good quality". I have watched a wide variety of movies with a wide variety of bitrates. Many movies will work perfectly fine in HD at bitrates of about 7Mb/s - which is what you can fit on a DVD-9. A lot of them will not.

Also, movies that look fantastic on my 17" laptop and 20" PC monitor look like crap on my 46" TV.

If you don't believe me go find a hardcore movie pirate who pirates HD movies (or just check a public bittorrent tracker and look at the file sizes), most 720P movies will fit on a DVD. 1080P movies would be pushing it on longer movies, but even then 90 minute movies would easily fit on one disc and look fantastic.

Movies like Ice Age and other animation will look really good, regular movies with a lot of movement will look OK and difficult encodes, that is movies with a lot of contrast, movies that have scenes with several light-sources in high-contrast scenes etc will look terrible. It depends.

My favorite example is the Shakira concert Blu-Ray, it is the only concert Blu-Ray I have, but I have the trailer for it, encoded at 7Mb/s and I have the Blu-Ray. When I watched the trailer it looked quite fine. When I compared it to the Blu-Ray I realized that the trailer in fact looks like crap. It's all relative.

As an example, the 1080P pirate of Casino Royale is a little over 12GB, but that's a 150 minute long movie.

OK, my new motherboard, CPU and RAM is coming tomorrow, and I'll try to find the Casino Royale HD bittorrent. I own the Blu-Ray. I will give it a quick review when I have downloaded it (which will probably take some time), but I'll keep this until I have it and I'll post the review here.

Now I'm not saying that it'll be videophile level video, but it'd be competitive in terms of quality with the downloadable HD movies available nowadays on iTunes and Xbox Live, and if people are willing to buy those maybe a cheap physical disc format that doesn't require downloading for hours and hours would actually work.

I have no doubt that consumers are willing to forgo the quality of a good 1080p encode to save a buck. I don't think they will fall for Toshiba's BS again though. If Tosh doesn't release a Blu-Ray player before this years holiday season, they are nuts.

Is this the same thing..?

[Kokuyo]

I didn't read TFA, but since heise.de just brought an anouncement that Toshiba is planning to kill Blu-Ray by introducing a normal DVD player with enhanced upscaling... Is this the same thing or are they betting on two horses?

The heise article is here: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Toshiba-setzt-Kampf-gegen-Blu-ray-Disc-mit-einem-DVD-Player-fort--/meldung/108830

Re:Is this the same thing..?

[Zelos]

Enhanced upscaling? Is that going to be like in Hollywood movies where they press someone says "Enhance" and the techie guy magically turns a blurry 640x480 CCTV shot into a perfect 20 Megapixel image?

Re:Is this the same thing..?

[bloodninja]

The interpolation (or however it is called) in the Enhanced Zoom plugin for Compiz almost seems like that 'enhance' technology of the movies. Try it and see how clear 480x640 pictures can be when they fill up a 1680x1050 monitor. I'd really like to know how that works, and being open source, anybody who understands that stuff can.

Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[N8F8]

It's as simple as that. I'll steal content via Bittorrent before I give a penny to Sony. I have a pretty huge DVD collection and was starting to buy HD-DVD. But I REFUSE to pay Sony for their anti-competitive practices and consumer-unfriendly products.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[db32]

You do realize that you probably just signed yourself up for some hate from the Sony Fanclub? I really liked the PS1 and PS2, but Sony seems to be back to inspecting their own colon again. Beta, Minidisk, MemoryStickDuo, and now BluRay. It's like these assholes can't get enough of themselves. Not to mention my Sony fanboy friend has a Sony digital camera on top of all his other Sony shit and that piece of crap that uses some strange video codec. I have been able to play videos off of that damned camera without headache on ONE computer out of 6 so far. Most don't have the codecs and even the "just works" Windows installs fail on finding the appropriate codec most of the time. All of this coupled with their dealings with the RIAA lawsuit mess. Oh and the PS3 flops of "oh well our stuff is so sensitive we can't make the controller vibrate cuz 6 axis is too good" when the real story was "lawsuits are kicking us in the balls and we can't do it without getting in trouble...so all of you need to forget the fact that the Wii can do everything we can't in a controller and believe our stupid lines about why it won't work". Sony really needs to pull their heads out of their collective ass and get with the program.

Personally, I still want my money for that stupid ass claim about "if you can find a PS3 on the shelves we will pay you!" In the mean time, years later and I am still having a damned hard time finding the latest Wii accessory and I am apparently some kind of luck God for just walking into a Gamestop and buying a Wii because they are STILL perpetually sold out.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[Nossie]

well said sir, wish I had mod points :-/

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[^_^x]

Irrational memes are annoying.

Poor HD-DVD, the plucky young open format backed by no particular company, its ambitions quashed by big bad Sony and their campaign to make every format unique and proprietary!

They're both proprietary formats because they're new, commercial, and DRMed. At one time CD was quite inaccessible unless you had rare expensive hardware to author them. DVD went through this too. Never mind little details like HD-DVD being pushed by Toshiba through things like bribing movie studios... or that the Blu-Ray Disc Association has 18 member companies and 66 contributors and even from its inception was formed of nine companies. It's those bullies Sony (Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung) making a format that no one else can read. After all, the only Blu-Ray players are made by Sony, right? Oh, they're not...

Sony Sixaxis PR? Yeah, total BS like most of what they'd said about gaming the last few years... they need to fix that. Seems a bit better now but I still can't trust them easily.

Also just wondering what kind of camera your friend has? My DSC-P150 does JPEG and MPEG, though I used to have a Kodak that did FlashPix...

But hey, I must be a Sony fanboy because I'm not a Toshiba fanboy spewing hate for Sony, right? That kind of thin rationalization usually goes hand in hand with the "it's another proprietary Sony format!" argument. Toshiba working with most of the founders of Blu-Ray backed DVD when it came out and they weren't the villains simply because the technical working group demanded a single format be released and the consumers' only choice was DVD or VHS. I think most people were just mad that they were made to choose and couldn't wait for a winner before buying either.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[popeye44]

Now I'll preface this by saying first and foremost. I paid 325.00 for my PS3 with 7 games and 3 controllers. I did not pay Sony directly.
I'm pretty much like most of Slashdot and I am typically disgusted by Sony.
However as you can see below it's a nice machine.
I have dvd9 disks burnt with BDMV format and they work. "and look excellent on 1080i/720p"
I have it running Linux. Yellowdog or Ubuntu either one work good. "as far as my limited Linux experience goes.. hehe"
I have it streaming WMV, XVID and DIVX it will stream mpeg4 or H.264 too "from inside the ps3 OS not from Linux!" Not that Linux cannot.. I'm just stupid in Linux...
I can add a larger drive.
A rumor says I can rip a bd-dvd using the DD command but I don't really have a big drive to work with just yet.
It's had two updates since i owned it and so far both seem to work great.

However for the price I paid I have blu-ray support. Streaming video over gigabit. Lots and LOTS of high def support including the fact it's a great upconverter.

I also own a HD-DVD. Sadly... It's a nice player and I own a few disks. But as a format it's dead :(

So I'm not a SONY fanboy but as far as systems go it's a hell of a nice package. For what I paid it's friggin outstanding. "gotta love Craigslist!"

Ohh yea.. and it plays games..

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[Anonymous Coward]

Blu-ray won the war against HD-DVD, period. Why you guys are such sore losers? Betamax had better quality, MiniDisk was not meant to replace CD and was quite popular in Asia, Memory Stick is a more strict (compatible) standard than Secure Digital's incompatible mess, although it's more expensive.

Why don't you install the video codec that came with the digital camera? There must be a copy of installation CD somewhere. Seriously, the codec problem is more to do with Microsoft's Windows than Sony's.

Why would you disadvantage your company if you are in a lawsuit but have to release a game machine that will probably use that same technology? "We will have a DualShock 3 for PS3, and by the way we are being sued for using this, so we will just have to pay more" doesn't sound like a good business strategy to me.

What's Wii's popularity got anything to do with this? I didn't know Wii was able to play Blu-ray or this supposedly new high-def technology.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[db32]

Congratulations. I do the same thing with music (albeit very very rarely). Buy used :) You get what you want and don't have to give the money to a bad behaving megacorp. I have done the same thing with every Sony PS1/PS2 I have ever purchased. I also paid about half of the shelf price in every case.

The million dollar question here is also which PS3 did you get? Apparently not all of them are backwards compatible since Sony opted to remove the hardware that allowed that in an attempt to bring down the price. I don't know much about them, but I loathe that different versions of the same thing shit. MS does it, Sony does it, and I generally refuse to buy products that exist that way since it is such a royal pain in the ass to figure out WTF capabilities you actually have since the boxes are very very rarely upfront on the technical end about what does and doesn't work. Linksys and Belkin network cards are fucking horrible that way...Belkin sells the 7 different wireless network cards under the same name and you don't know which one you get until you open the damned box.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[db32]

I don't remember supporting HD-DVD anywhere in my post. So yes, you are an irrational Sony fanboy on that front. I never once spoke to the quality or worthiness of HD-DVD or how/why it was defeated. I just said I am sick of Sony's bullshit. And given that they have such a horrible track record of screwing consumers I am not very trusting of them. For what it is worth I think of the formats they have cooked up on their own BluRay is probably the least fucked since they are letting others play too. I think they at least learned a partial lesson when they got their dicks slapped out of their hands in the VHS Betamax thing. (And for all the people who bitch that Betamax was better, yes, it was technically better and murdered by shitty business decisions to try and fuck the consumer once again, which shows that regardless of the technical quality of their products they are still a shitty company.)

That said I still fail to see the point in BluRay or HD-DVD. Spending thousands of dollars on extra gear to make a movie slightly more shiney seems pretty stupid to me. But I am more impressed by content than I am by "OMFG look at the resolution!" Same reason I am unimpressed by xbox and PS3. Its the same damed thing rehashed with better graphics. Wii, even for its lack of graphics, is actually pretty new and interesting. Same problem with movies, I don't give a fuck about Saw I, II, III, IV, XXXIV. I want a damned movie with a decent thinking plot that doesn't just rely on sick shock value or dumb ass slapstick to bring in viewers.

As far as the camera goes it uses MPEG4 which is just a container of sorts. I'm not sure at all what video codec it uses, but it doesn't play on my Mac with Flip4Win, full QT, and Perian installed. It won't play on the linux box with the win32codecs installed. It has played correctly one 1 out of 5 Windows machines with a second one playing it back with shitty horrible choppiness and 3 failing altogether. Irritating to say the least as I am not much for screwing with video stuff and have been too lazy to convert it to something more reasonable.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[terjeber]

Sony digital camera on top of all his other Sony shit and that piece of crap that uses some strange video codec

As far as I know, and there is a tiny chance I am wrong here, Sony cameras and camcorders use one of the following codecs: HDV MPEG-2, DV, AVCHD or M-JPEG. These are the standard codecs used by all camera and camcorder manufacturers. Seems like you are blaming Sony for you own inadequacies.

Not a big Sony fan, I own the PS3, but stay with Canon for all my photo and camcorder gear, but bs is bs.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[db32]

By strange video codec I mean it is not included with the combination of full QT, Flip4Win, and Perian. So no joy on the Mac playing it without headache. Doesn't seem to play on the linux box with win32codec installed. And 3 of the 5 Windows machines would go looking for codec and return codec download failed. The two that worked had VLC installed so I suspect it includes the proper codec, but I'm not going to tell everyone I want to show the video to go install VLC on their chosen platform. So it could very well be one of those codecs but the fact that it makes it nearly impossible to just share the videos based on the codec it is using makes it rather irritating.

That said my Canon camera videos play fine on all of the mentioned boxes without any extra bullshit to make them play. As did every other digital camera I have owned (none Sony) over the years. I did in fact purchase a Sony camera once, but we didn't even get home before we turned around and took it back when we realized it used that double priced memory stick duo nonsense and would not use the SD cards that all of our other devices use.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[terjeber]

By strange video codec I mean it is not included with the combination of full QT, Flip4Win, and Perian.

I find that very odd, and I would love to know what camera it is you are talking about. As I said, I have not heard of any camera from any major producer that doesn't use one of the mentioned codecs. There are several tools on Windows (GSpot, YAAI) that will help you find the codec, I'd love to know which one it is. As I said, I don't use Sony cameras or camcorders, I am a Canon person my self, but this sounds very odd.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[db32]

Actually I lied a bit. After getting home and looking again I realize I don't have a Canon, I have a Nikon but the base point is still the same. Apparently his camera is a Handycam DCR-SR42. After a bit of googling on the specific model (I didn't bother to check at the time due to my irritation) I find that it does not seem to record in MPG4 as my friend said (I didn't exactly look at the documentation to verify, I assumed he knew his equipment). It seems it is doing mpeg-2 and from the looks of things it causes problems for a lot of people on a variety of platforms. From what I gather the correct codec can be a pain to fetch based on WMV version and Apple has chosen to charge an extra $20 for that capability with QT. I suspect I just didn't tinker long enough on the linux box, but after I bought my macbook I rebuilt my old laptop with Ubuntu and gave it to my wife so there could very well be missing pieces there I didn't look at.

Ultimitely this seems to be the issue with quite a few of the Sony Handycams. This certainly isn't the only reason I dislike Sony though, it was just another log on the fire so to speak.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[terjeber]

I have a Nikon but the base point is still the same.

You are absolutely correct, the base point is the same, and the base point is that you have only shown one thing, a general ineptness and a hasty drawing of conclusions based mainly on your own likes/dislikes coupled with your own ignorance.

It seems it is doing mpeg-2 and from the looks of things it causes problems for a lot of people on a variety of platforms.

Ignorance and ineptness is two of the most common features among people in general. The fact that others share your ineptness doesn't make it less sad. MPEG-2 is a codec that isn't distributed for free, and therefore not a codec Windows Movie Player will download automatically. The same people would not be able to play a DVD for exactly the same reason, you need a licensed MPEG-2 decoder on your PC or Mac to play MPEG-2 video. Now, if you had read the manual that came with the Sony or if you had checked around, you would have known that.

The majority of newer camcorders that records HD, or standard def camcorders that record to flash memory or to DVD record in MPEG-2, the newest ones in AVCHD. If you don't have an MPEG-2 decoder on your PC, you can obviously not see this video.

It is of course not at all surprising that you blame Sony for your incompetence. It has to be someone else's fault, right?

Ultimitely this seems to be the issue with quite a few of the Sony Handycams

It is an issue primarily with you, but an issue you would run into if you got a Sony Handicam, a Canon camcorder, a Panasonic camcorder, or any of the hundreds of models that record MPEG-2. A significant number of them do. But hey, don't let me dissuade you from blaming others for you incompetence, I know it is easier for you to do so.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[Squozen]

That'll be AVC-HD. It's a reasonably new codec and only supported by a few applications so far (a list can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCHD).

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[^_^x]

Well, I didn't really accuse you of supporting HD-DVD, but I did bring it up since the two are kind of inextricably linked when criticizing one. TBH I'd like to put one to use, but still don't see the movies that really need it - I think I'd mostly get big budget all-CG movies if anything in HD...

The part I take issue with is the double standard people hold Sony to - DVD comes out, backed by a group of companies, cool - a new video format! Everyone takes to it eventually. HD-DVD comes out backed by a group of companies, again almost no one has a problem with it. Blu-Ray comes out backed by a group of companies including 6 of 10 of those behind the original DVD at first, before gathering many many more, and people whinge and whine about how Sony's forcing them to use another closed proprietary format! The other two were the exact same story. The much-loved DVD was also backed partially by Sony, there just wasn't a format war. As soon as there was a question of which to use, Sony's the villain again because... I don't know, some fantasy that they're out to ruin people's lives and other giant corporations are here to save us? Maybe confused resentment thinking that Sony BMG Music is the same as Sony Pictures, or that Sony Corporation forced Sony BMG to put the rootkit onto an audio CD? I can only guess. Whenever they make a move, a certain segment of people react as if Gator is doing a Google project and it's the end for all honest consumers or something...

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you are working for Microsoft or Toshiba, what have you lost in this HD-DVD/Blu-ray format war? Maybe you bought an HD-DVD player, but if you did, that's your fault for supporting the format that did not have a future.

Not only you are advocating unethical file sharing, but you are also accusing Sony for this unfounded anti-competitive practices. Where's the proof? Why no companies are crying foul? Toshiba raised their white flag without making any ruckus about the whole deal.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[db32]

My incompetence did not choose a camera that recorded in some bullshit fashion. In fact, as I mentioned, the one time I realized I did purchase a camera with screwball features I took the thing back before we even got home with it. When I make purchases I avoid crap like this. This was not my camera. These were videos shot for me on someone elses camera that I am unable to play based on the manufacturers codec choice. I would bitch about any maker that did that, not just Sony. And as I have mentioned now repeatedly it wasn't just the camera. It was the fact that they have a long track record of being shitheads and this was just one more reason they irritated me most recently.

End of day I'm still not buying more software just to play these videos so it has nothing to do with my incompetence. I also don't install a bunch of garbage just to get this one thing done. I will reencode on another machine and be done with it. The problem isn't that I can't play the videos at all, the problem is Sony's choices made me jump through burning hoops to be able to do something simple like play the damned video. Burning hoops that I have never had to deal with on any other camera I have ever encountered. Oh and I apologize for my incompetence of not memorizing the model of the camera that was used in filming the videos when they were given to me. I suppose I should have renamed all of the files to reflect that so that when they didn't play like every other damned video I have ever pulled of of digital cameras I would know exactly where to go to download the manual and read it. As I said previously, this wasn't my camera, I had to call the guy to find the model number, and I certainly didn't have the manual to look at during any point of this.

I was under the unfortunate impression that you might actually have some worthwhile information regarding this rather than a bunch of insulting nonsense. I was sadly mistaken.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[db32]

I called the friend with the camera to get the model and it is not one of the ones listed here. I found some other information that points to it doing mpeg2 stuff making it a pain in the ass. Thanks for the heads up though, will keep an eye out for these ones too.

Re:Bittorrent Before Blue-Ray!

[terjeber]

My incompetence did not choose a camera that recorded in some bullshit fashion

You are correct, choosing that camera is not incompetent. Thinking that the industry standard of MPEG-2 is some weird unknown file format, that is incompetence.

When I make purchases I avoid crap like this.

Continuing to state that MPEG-2 is "crap" just emphasizes the extent of your incompetence.

I am unable to play based on the manufacturers codec choice

No, your lack of ability is the cause of your inability to play this, not the manufacturers codec. MPEG-2 is the industry standard for video and the fact that you still don't understand that just deepens my awe at your cluelessness.

I would bitch about any maker that did tha

All camcorder manufacturers have camcorders that record in MPEG-2, so that must mean that you are a genius and everybody else is dumb, right? MPEG-2 is also, together with AVC, the only standards for consumer HD camcorders. None of those codecs are available for Windows Media Player via download, so that means that according to your "logic", every single consumer HD camcorder is crap. The fact that you don't understand how clueless that shows you are is amazing. To drive this home - if you get any consumer level HD camcorder, you will not be able to play the recorded video using Windows Media Player unless you install additional software. If you get an AVCHD camcorder, which is at least half the models, you will not be able to capture the video through WMP at all at this point in time (there are ways to make WMP play H.264, but that would teach you about jumping through hoops.

I'm still not buying more software just to play these videos so it has nothing to do with my incompetence

All of the MPEG-2 camcorders come with a little round plastic thing, they call it a CD. These "CDs" contains software, and this software will allow you to decode MPEG-2, the industry standard for video. Oh, and it's amazing that you persist in this.

Sony's choices made me jump through burning hoops

MPEG-2 made you jump through hoops? MPEG-2 is the industry standard for distributing video. All DVDs are encoded with MPEG-2. If you have cable TV, there is an 80-90% chance that all of the content you watch on TV is MPEG-2. The fact that you don't know this is amazing.

I apologize for my incompetence of not memorizing the model of the camera

That was not your incompetence. Read up on the video format that is called MPEG-2, and you might become just a little bit less incompetent. Maybe.

I was under the unfortunate impression that you might actually have some worthwhile information

Oh, I do. Don't worry. The problem was that you showed an amazing level of arrogance when harshly blamed what is considered the worlds number one or two (Canon people like me tend to put Canon as one) camcorder producer for you own incompetence. When you persisted in stating that MPEG-2 is some sort of weird, unknown codec, you just showed that you are unable to digest information and learn something. If you had asked what the problem might be, displaying some sort of humble attitude towards your own massive lack of knowledge, you would have gotten a more polite answer.

Oh, and to repeat, I am not a Sony fanboy, I use Canon camcorders, but I do recognize that Sony makes some of the very best consumer and prosumer level camcorders in the world. The Sony VX-2000 series is, in my opinion, by far the best prosumer camcorders in it's price range for SD photography. The new HDV line is also very, very good. Oh, and many of them, as with many of the Canon and other HD camcorders, shoot and store in MPEG-2. Of course.

Re:Note to Obama & Hillary

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks!
- Team McCain

This was gonna happen

[Midnight Thunder]

While I didn't expect Toshiba to be the company to announce the next-next generation format (especially this soon), there are certainly other formats in the wings. The future formats are based on 'holographic memory', with the 'Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) being one of them. The HVD promises 3.9 TB of storage, but with a price tag of around $15000 for a drive and $180 for a disk, this puts it clearly in range of companies with the needs and the money.

Myself I am just sitting waiting for affordable rewritable versions (this include Blu-Ray) to become available for PCs.

Re:This was gonna happen

[gbjbaanb]

The HVD promises 3.9 TB of storage, but with a price tag of around $15000 for a drive and $180 for a disk, this puts it clearly in range of companies with the needs and the money. ouch, but imagine the bragging rights from the early-adopters on that!

RTFA - I know, I'm wierd....

[Anonymous Coward]

But I actually read the article.

Its just a DVD player with built in upscaling capabilities.

See where it says

"One Japanese report appeared to suggest that the new technology would be able produce much higher-resolution images from existing DVDs, but did not address the apparent impossibility of this claim.

The modified DVD format relies on a newly-developed large scale integrated circuit chip to rapidly convert the stored video, but no technical details were released."

Not a new format, just HD-DVD/Blu-Ray resolution output

Basically doing in the DVD Player what many TV's do internally.

Re:RTFA - I know, I'm wierd....

[EditDroid]

"One Japanese report appeared to suggest that the new technology would be able produce much higher-resolution images from existing DVDs, but did not address the apparent impossibility of this claim. It's not impossible. The Toshiba algorithm combines information from multiple frames to create a higher resolution version of each individual frame.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_resolution.

Re:RTFA - I know, I'm wierd....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is just a upscaling player. The chip is basically slightly cut down Cell processor.

Technique itself is so called "super resolution based upconversion". It works by taking several, say four temporally consecutive video frames and then looking for features. If image changes only slowly you can get more informatation by combining details from these several frames. This then results to higher resolution image.

BUT there is a big problem, if video stream changes fast (i.e action movie) algorithm simply fails really badly. Overall quality is slightly better than with normal upscaling, but it is still no match at all for high bitrate 1080p video.

This super resolution tech has been in use in astronomy for a long time, so no magic there either.

Re:RTFA - I know, I'm wierd....

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, upscaling?

http://www.oppodigital.com/

I kept my Toshiba HD-A3 precisely because its upscaler easily outperformed the one in my TV, and was dang close to Oppo quality.

I'm eying the dual-format players that came out a few months ago, since I have a few HD DVDs and those units are around $400 right now, same price as any other Blu-Ray player.

Re:RTFA - I know, I'm wierd....

[Anonymous Coward]

Many DVD players do this now, too, not to mention Audio-Video Receivers...

To find a list of such DVD players, go to:
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers/

click in the box for 1080i/720p upscaling and hit "search". My quick results returned 584 players that support upscaling, of which 55 are made by toshiba.

How is their news announcement anything new?
And why doesn't every /.'er use the above website?

Optical discs?

[Vlobulle]

I don't care anymore, SSD will probably become cheaper than Blu-Ray in a few years.

TFA misses the point

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually about DVD players with better upscalers. There is no new format or anything like that.

Upscaling DVD player, not a new format

[68kmac]

According to heise.de (German only, sorry), Toshiba will release a DVD player equipped with a Cell processor that will upscale the DVD content. That article only talks of "DVD" all the time, there's no mention of a new format.

Pointless

[fistfullast33l]

I'm not really a believer that physical format is going to give way to digital downloads in the next 10 years, but by the time this format comes to market, unless it's considered next-gen to Bluray, I think Bluray will be too entrenched. Look at how little impact Bluray and HD-DVD had for the first two years or so. So assume it takes three years to develop and get a product line, then another two years to have any kind of market impact, we'll be 5 years out and then people really will start to feel that hi-def digital downloads are not that far away.

And backwards compatability to DVD - What's the point? I'll be paying $30-$40 for a disc that will work in my DVD player? So why shouldn't I just buy the movie for 10 bucks at Walmart? We already know that the first release for this thing is going to be The 5th Element, so who's going to go for that when they already have it on DVD?

Just seems a bit pointless to me.

Re:Pointless

[Rogerborg]

the first release for this thing is going to be The 5th Element, so who's going to go for that when they already have it on DVD?

I hear that in the new version, you can actually see the pores on Milla's nipples.

Re:Pointless

[Jeremy Erwin]

The 5th Element has already been released twice on Bluray. Once in MPEG-2, once in H.264. Owners of the first bluray release could trade in their discs.

You can see the difference here

Notice that more of her skin pores are visible in the H.264 version.

Re:Pointless

[Rogerborg]

Well, God damn. My hyperbole needs defragged.

New name picked for high def disc format

[192939495969798999]

I hear that the new format will be called High-Definition DVD, or HD-DVD, and it will be major competition for blu-ray. At stores, you'll see them both right next to each other on the shelves, confusing consumers until some point when one of the two formats goes away.... er wait, what?

Re:New name picked for high def disc format

[Anonymous Coward]

There's not enough repetition in that name. The new name will be HHDDVDVDBBD.

Well, I guess this is one way to do DRM

[moxley]

Well, I guess this is one way to do DRM - Just release a shitty new standard every year and watch it fail. After aother year headly anyone will be able to play the stuff, let alone take the time to track down tools to decode it.

everyone is reading the press release wrong

[circletimessquare]

toshiba is indeed creating a new DVD player, yes, this is true. and indeed, the DVD player they are making will not be blu-ray... it will be x-ray, a decepticon character for the upcoming transformers 2 movie. its gimmicky product placement

so everyone calm down, this is merely a movie technology villain, not a villain of movie technology. i mean yes, it is a technology villain from a movie, not a villainous movie tech, i mean... oh forget it

Re:everyone is reading the press release wrong

[CodeBuster]

i mean yes, it is a technology villain from a movie, not a villainous movie tech, i mean... Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, [approaches and softens] does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.

maybe not

[poetmatt]

Wasn't china working on their own High Def format?

Toshiba's name is not absent this list, so I'm guessing this is the same format.

Re:maybe not

[evilviper]

China starts lots of projects like this. They serve only to demonstrate to the world how advanced China is, and how they don't need the rest of the world. They spend tons of money to develop far inferior (but domestically developed!) alternatives to easily and cheaply available western technology. It never goes anywhere.

Their EVD (IIRC) format comes to mind. It was based on incompatible use of DVD tech to give a trivial capacity boost, and the (terribly poor performing yet lower quality than MPEG-2) AVS video codec it used. Considering that JPEG is ancient and patent-free tech, and independently re-implementing inter-frame compression is so simple I could do a halfway decent job of it myself in a week, I'm stunned by how little China has achieved despite how much money they have spent. Large retailers in their own country defy the government mandate to carry them, because demand in nil, and the higher performance and non-standard decoding hardware required is far more expensive.

I guess I'd better end this rant here...

Re:maybe not

[ch-chuck]

They spend tons of money to develop far inferior (but domestically developed!) alternatives to easily and cheaply available western technology. It never goes anywhere.

That sounds like a good description of M$FT, except replace "It never goes anywhere" with "Then we all are forced to live with it".

Re:maybe not

[cozziewozzie]

China starts lots of projects like this. They serve only to demonstrate to the world how advanced China is, and how they don't need the rest of the world. They spend tons of money to develop far inferior (but domestically developed!) alternatives to easily and cheaply available western technology. It never goes anywhere. Japan started by making inferior knockoffs of Western products, then Taiwan and Korea followed, and they are all high-tech superpowers.

There are advantages to fostering domestic high-tech development, as you need a lot of experience to play with the big boys. They are educating and employing an army of young scientists end engineer who would otherwise fuck off to the US, Japan and Germany and work for the high-tech companies there. It's a loss in the short-term, but it is the only way to develop a homebrewed high-tech industry.

You can't expect a Chinese company to catch up with a century of experience that companies like Ford, GM, Toshiba, Matsushita, etc. have. But if you don't try and tread the same path yourself, you will forever be dependent on foreign imports.

Re:maybe not

[gad_zuki!]

Theres a different between a knock-off that can potentially be sold at market and a propaganda tech "win."

So how's the Dragon PC w/ the People's Linux coming along?

Re:maybe not

[cozziewozzie]

Tell that to Sony, with their long line of tech wins which failed in the market.

You can make cheap knockoffs forever, or you can try to take initiative and do R&D. Sometimes it will work, a lot of the times, it will turn out to be rubbish, especially when you're just starting in the industry.

So how's the Dragon PC w/ the People's Linux coming along? I don't know, but Lenovo PCs running QQ are all the rage in China. You know, QQ, that tech "win". They should have just used skype. Or purchased from Dell.

Re:maybe not

[Hal_Porter]

China starts lots of projects like this. They serve only to demonstrate to the world how advanced China is, and how they don't need the rest of the world. They spend tons of money to develop far inferior (but domestically developed!) alternatives to easily and cheaply available western technology. It never goes anywhere.

Their EVD (IIRC) format comes to mind. It was based on incompatible use of DVD tech to give a trivial capacity boost, and the (terribly poor performing yet lower quality than MPEG-2) AVS video codec it used. Considering that JPEG is ancient and patent-free tech, and independently re-implementing inter-frame compression is so simple I could do a halfway decent job of it myself in a week, I'm stunned by how little China has achieved despite how much money they have spent. Large retailers in their own country defy the government mandate to carry them, because demand in nil, and the higher performance and non-standard decoding hardware required is far more expensive.

I guess I'd better end this rant here... That's good to know. Taiwan is cleaning up with things like the Asus EEE Pc. And an absolute buttload of ODM work for well known brands.

Re:maybe not

[westlake]

They are educating and employing an army of young scientists end engineer who would otherwise fuck off to the US, Japan and Germany and work for the high-tech companies there. It's a loss in the short-term, but it is the only way to develop a homebrewed high-tech industry.

Japan started by making inferior knockoffs of Western products.

After World War II Japan made the decison to shed its reputation for cheap knock-offs. In optics. Machine tools. Steel. Automobiles. Electronics...

In 2008, the home-brewed high-tech industry is a geek fantasy. There is simply too much to be gained by moving quickly and efficiently into world markets.

There is very good chance a Chinese engineer will be working for a western owned lab in China.

When China joined the WTO, Microsoft was the first western company to become a menber of China's software trade association.

Microsoft is building a big new campus in Beijing, slated to employ 5,000 people and become Microsoft's largest research center outside the U.S.

Microsoft to build $280mln R&D center in Beijing

Re:maybe not

[evilviper]

You DO realize that Taiwan is a completely separate country from China, right? China won't acknowledge it, but it's undeniable in practice, and recognized as sovereign by the rest of the world.

Japan is doing quite well to... Just because they're off the coast of China doesn't make them one in the same.

Re:maybe not

[Hal_Porter]

You DO realize that Taiwan is a completely separate country from China, right? China won't acknowledge it, but it's undeniable in practice, and recognized as sovereign by the rest of the world. I'm in Taiwan at the moment and love it here. And I've basically hated the Chinese government since Tienanmen. So it's good to hear they're screwing up in electronics.

But despite the fact that Taiwan (the Republic of China) is a de facto independent democracy, it is definitely not recognized as sovereign by the rest of the world. The rest of the world after many temper tantrums from Beijing (that People's Republic of China) accepts that regimes 'One China principle', which means that the unelected government in Beijing, heirs to Mao Zedong one of the greatest mass murderers in history is the legally true representative of all China. And Taiwan has no UN seat.

Then again the US quietly send two aircraft carrier battle groups to patrol off Taiwan during Taiwan's last election, and has told Beijing it will defend Taiwan should Beijing attack. But the US doesn't officially recognize Taiwan as an independent state. What the US does recognize is a bit subtle, but they presumably hope that they can keep Taiwan de facto independent and thus democratic but discourage it from seeking de jure independence until Beijing democratizes. In the meantime they will deter Beijing from attacking it whilst proclaiming they support the One China principle. Of course, One China wouldn't be a bad idea at all if that China was democratic. The Taiwanese could spread their excellent system into the mainland, much like West Germany did following German unification.

Personally, unlike my government and the UN, I regard Taiwan as the One True China, based on the size of the electorate that elected Presidents. Many more people voted for Ma Ying-jeou, President of the Republic Of China than Hu Jintao, President of People's Republic Of China and political legitimacy comes purely from elections.

Re:maybe not

[hassanchop]

I don't know, but Lenovo PCs...Or purchased from Dell

You mean IBM right? Because that's who they DID buy from, and the fact that it was the whole company really doesn't change anything.

Why would they be proud that their best PC company is an American hand-me-down?

Re:maybe not

[cozziewozzie]

Lenovo was selling millions of PCs long before they purchased IBM's PC division.

The news site is down...

[cryptodan]

I guess the site which this article is about is inaccessible. Maybe the Blu-Ray people are DDoSing it?

Re:The news site is down...

[kiehlster]

This is likely the work of Media "Format" Defender's servers detecting an "illegal" distribution format. Or perhaps the ISP is throttling the site in order to block the unwanted news.

crap, someone modded me informative

[circletimessquare]

it was meant as a stupid joke. there is nothing informative about my post at all. toshiba is NOT making a decepticon called xray

so i find myself in the interesting predicament of asking someone to mod down my own post in the interest of honesty. i've been misunderstood. or at least mod me funny instead?

Re:crap, someone modded me informative

[Anonymous Coward]

Relax, you probably weren't misunderstood. There are many mods out there that mod funny posts with something other than funny, because you don't get karma bonus for "funny" and they want you to have it.

Now, I don't know why anyone would give a shit about karma, but I guess some people put an awful lot of importance on the thing...

Maybe ...

[mlwmohawk]

Without more details, it is difficult to say exactly, but this may be the Blue-Ray killer.

*if* a DVD disk can play at a lower resolution on an old dvd player, but play at Blue-ray resolution with a new player. Then blue ray may die.

There are a LOT of old-style DVD players out there and regular DVDs still outsell, by far, blue ray. Now, if one product satisfies both the technology luddite and the early adopter, blue ray has some serious competition. People with old DVD players can buy new high res disks but not be left out in the media cold with their computers, laptops, or bedroom TVs.

It makes a lot of sense, and really, it is probably the only way to defeat blue ray.

Re:Maybe ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened to Dual Layer, Dual Side? Wouldn't that be 17 gigs?

If you had your standard DVD movie taking up half of one side, for standard players (or the equiv of one single layer disc), then you'd have the reminder of the disk (~13 gigs) for your h264 HD content.

I'm visualising a player that has a laser both below the disk and above, as to make side change seamless.

TFA Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the servers appear to be slashdotted, here is the text from the article after I let it load for a few hours:

Unconfirmed rumours claim a High-res upgrade for existing DVD technology is in the works, making us wonder if Toshiba has swallowed stupid pills.. Toshiba is working on an extension to the DVD format which will offer video quality comparable to that produced by Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, according to Japanese media reports.

The company plans to begin selling a DVD player based on the new technology within six months, Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported yesterday citing unnamed sources at Toshiba.

The new enhanced DVD players will be sold at lower prices than Blu-ray players, according to the sources.

Toshiba ceded to the rival Blu-ray format in February 2008 after spending years developing its own HD-DVD next-generation video disc standard.

HD-DVD was backed by a consortium of companies including Microsoft and Intel, while Sony is the lead developer of Blu-ray.

The new DVD player will be backwards-compatible with standard DVD discs, according to the sources.

One Japanese report appeared to suggest that the new technology would be able produce much higher-resolution images from existing DVDs, but did not address the apparent impossibility of this claim.

The modified DVD format relies on a newly-developed large scale integrated circuit chip to rapidly convert the stored video, but no technical details were released.

Manufacturers have attempted to extend the lifespan of existing storage technologies by adding additional data which can be used by new players but ignored by older players.

For example, hybrid Super Audio CDs (SACDs) can be played in traditional CD players but produce higher quality audio when played in special players. However, SACDs have failed to meet sales targets.

Why not call it DIVX HD and sell them at CC

[Joe The Dragon]

Why not call it DIVX HD and sell them at Circuit City

I'll settle on a new format when I'm dead

[kiehlster]

Is it me or does everyone keep promising new formats whenever we have any inclination of settling on one? Blu-ray may have won the battle, but they haven't won the war in my eyes. Here are 10 reasons in random numbered order why I've shunned Blu-ray and everything that is media hyped.

1. I'd rather be programming something.

2. Passive entertainment sucks. I've grown weary of it after seeing my dad waste the last 20 years of his evenings in front of a tube.

3. My TV is not a movie theater. High-def really doesn't look that much better on a little TV. And I'm an engineer. Why fix it when it ain't broke?

4. My computer is 5 years old, my drives are full, I don't have a laptop, I need a new car, all my clothes are worn out, I lack furniture, I might buy a house. Do I really need an expensive blu-ray player? Maybe when I'm older, but then I might be married with kids. I think I'll pass.

5. I hate Sony with a passion. Every Sony product I've ever bought/used (DVD player, stereo, cd-roms, Everquest, etc) has only ended in disappointment. And every company/industry they overtake turns to garbage. Toshiba's products are heading in the same direction.

6. Those blue cases are gay. Sure, you need to distinguish them from DVDs, but the blue is reminiscent of Bondi blue.

7. The selection sucks. Every feature that comes out on a new format, the "pilot" of the format, is usually rated 3/5-stars or worse. Wait a few years and a new format appears and the whole process starts over. Then your old player dies and your library has turned useless, or you're stuck with some crappy "after market" player.

8. Every movie on DVD, let alone Blu-ray, in stores is still the same way. I have to plan my movie watchings so I can order them online, and when has watching a movie ever been planned a week in advance? Redbox will never have obscure movies. Hollywood and Blockbuster always have scratches on their obscure selections. Netflix isn't worth the subscription since I hardly ever watch movies.

9. I bought my first console, the Wii. My tiny movie budget is now going toward all the ridiculous number of accessories and games (controllers, nunchucks, wavebirds for smash, balance board, guitars). And it's way more fun than vegitating.

10. The so-called format war has only finished its first battle. Every time I turn around we have news of a new emerging technology that promises release in 5 months offering storage sizes ten-fold or more greater than what we have now.

Format wars and piracy

[tamird]

Why would anyone go through the grief of overpaying for these early adopter formats? you're forced to buy into unproven, new, change-prone technology which requires dedicated hardware which also is very likely to be made obsolete in the very near term. It's so much simpler to type in the url of your favorite torrent site, add 720p to the search criteria and presto, you have a file that can be played on (almost) any reasonably new computer and can be placed on the media of your choice (read: external hard drive).

One good thing that happened....

[SGDarkKnight]

When HD did die, all the HD movies out there came down in price HUGE.... there were (maybe still are) lots of places that were clearing out their old stock of HD movies with sales of 3 for $20-$30, not to mention, Wal-Mart even started selling the HD players for the XBox 360 for $20... i picked up 2 of them just in case one broke... once I started seeing the huge clearance sales on the HD movies, I starting snatching them up, now i have a library of about 200 HD-DVD's that are decent movies for less than a quarter of what it should of cost me... too bad we won't be able to get any of the newer movies or for that matter any of the older ones that got convereted to HD-DVD.... ah well, just my two cents...

Re:One good thing that happened....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could always buy an HD-DVD burner, seemingly $100 on ebay, and download and burn Blu-Ray rips.

Then again if you're inclined to go out and buy 200 commercial discs, then the idea having tens of unlabeled silver discs lying around the living room probably isnt that attractive to you.

If only FVD got more backing

[Anonymous Coward]

Back during the planning, there was a third contender backed by the taiwanese gov't: FVD. It used the plain old red laser and snazzy compression to squeeze 135 minutes of 720p into a double layer disc, which conveniently evaded many DVD patents. It is a shame that the 360 did not use it instead of plain old DVD, we could have cheap FVD players by now :(

Alternately...

[Moraelin]

Player prices have dropped? Maybe your stronger Euro is misleading you, but there have been no price drops.

Alternately, all you're seeing is the effects of your Dollar's free fall.

Look, if it were just the Euro getting strong, it would be just the Euro getting strong. The fact is that the Canadian dollar is now worth a little more than 1 US Dollar, and has been for a while. Up from a little over 60 US cents, back in early 2000's. Even an Australian Dollar is slowly aproaching parity with the USD. Up from 47 US cents in 2001. Etc.

I don't think the strength of the Euro plays that much influence in those economies.

So basically I'm just saying that if the whole rest of the world seems to be going upwards fast, it isn't. It's you going downwards.

And with or without HD-DVD competition, you'd still have a dollar in freefall. It drives all import prices up over time.

Re:Alternately...

[ergo98]

Alternately, all you're seeing is the effects of your Dollar's free fall.

I'm Canadian. Our dollar has appreciated some 40% against the greenback in the past year. Old problem is that Blu-ray prices have increased in lockstep.

Re:Alternately...

[Anonymous Coward]

A brief glance at your pathetic post history about Sony, PS3s, Xboxes, BluRay, and HD-DVD brings tears of joy.

Suck it you fucking piece of garbage. You're nothing more than a piece of roadkill on the digital technology highway.

Watching my cheap Netflix BluRay movies on my 1080p set and my amazing PS3 is only made better knowing there a miserable fucks like you out there.

Re:Alternately...

[ergo98]

Come on, SuperKendall -- don't hide behind the AC. Spread your fanaticism out in the open.

Re:Alternately...

[dlanod]

You mention the Australian Dollar in your comparison. Blu-Ray player prices here in Australia have gone up since the scrapping of HD-DVD. Blu-Ray disc prices are static at about twice the price of DVDs and aren't selling awfully well. I don't think it can be attributed to the exchange rate fluctuations.

Re:Alternately...

[Squozen]

That's why you import a player and watch US discs. No awful rating on the front cover obscuring the artwork, no OFLC censorship, and far lower prices.

ISO

[Firehed]

I think that ISO might just be the standard, not just the standards-deciding body. (Hint: also joke, we know that avi is the real standard)

Re:ISO

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that the standard was 450x10MB RAR files...

-- gid

you haven't looked

[YesIAmAScript]

There is a huge promotion by WalMart. Perhaps tiny companies like WalMart and discounts that put a profile 2.0 player at $300 just slipped under your radar.

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=827856&p=11437594&highlight=blu-ray#post11437594

If you haven't seen any promotions, then you aren't looking closely. It's quite possible this is because you don't want to look closely, you're too busy declaring the death of BluRay to see that it isn't dying.

Re:you haven't looked

[ergo98]

It's quite possible this is because you don't want to look closely, you're too busy declaring the death of BluRay to see that it isn't dying.

Honestly, I would have thought that the Blu-ray fanatics would have found some new cause by now. This is just bizarre.

Declaring the death of Blu-ray? Amazingly, I said no such thing. The reality might just happen to be that the whole HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle made for a lot of media, with each battlefront move getting significant media coverage, and interest by the public (many of whom want some "cause" to sign up to, declaring their fealty). After the battle died down and the media disappeared...most just don't care.

And honestly, the fact that *you* seek out Blu-ray information says nothing about the general public. I am effectively the general public in this, and I can say that in Ontario, retailers like Best Buy, Future Shop, and even Walmart, have just completely stopped talking about the next generation formats. Where once there was 4 or more pages in each flier, now there is nothing at all.

Yeah, I could search out Blu-ray specific information, vectoring out from my Blu-ray-forever fanclub if I were to opt to join one, but that kinda misses the whole point, doesn't it?

Re:you haven't looked

[SuperKendall]

Honestly, I would have thought that the Blu-ray fanatics would have found some new cause by now. This is just bizarre.

And you'd think that HD-DVD fanatics would have woken to reality by now instead of inventing their own, but here you are.

You post a lot of words, and zero links of proof. That's how we know it's your reality and not the one we live in.

Re:you haven't looked

[ergo98]

You post a lot of words, and zero links of proof.

Yeah, except for the link detailing Blu-ray's moribund sales. As for other links...well honestly it's just sad at this point.

Go join the army or something. Isn't there a better cause than being a blu-ray shill? The format won, already! Give it up.

Re:you haven't looked

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You post a lot of words, and zero links of proof. You want him to post a link to advertising and promotions he claims don't exist?
Which world is that you live in?

Re:you haven't looked

[SuperKendall]

Yeah, except for the link detailing Blu-ray's moribund sales. As for other links...well honestly it's just sad at this point.

Your link proves nothing, except that disc sales fall after Christmas. Look at Home Media Report for ongoing facts in the steady rise of Blu-Ray media.

I would say nice try, but like your other posts it was just more pathetic FUD.

What will you do when by the end of the year Blu-Ray has grown further in market share? What does a person like you do when reality becomes so strong you cannot contain it from crushing your delicately fabricated reality? It's so sad to think of how many people like you, cannot simply move on from a war they are still fighting that is over...

Re:you haven't looked

[ergo98]

At this point I have to hope that you are just satirical, trying to post as a fanatical fanboy would. Blu-ray! Blu-ray! Blu-ray! Blu-ray!

What will you do when by the end of the year Blu-Ray has grown further in market share?

Uh...cry? What do you want me to say? Blu-ray won, so I, uh, own a blu-ray player, dipshit, so why the fuck would I care either way, but noting the hilarious paradox that is competition.

annot simply move on from a war they are still fighting that is over.

Holy fuck, shit for brains, look in the fucking mirror. Again, you are absolutely unbelievably stupid, just parroting rhetoric, still fighting a battle that is over.

Re:you haven't looked

[SuperKendall]

Amazon offers continued discounts on Blu-Ray media, and a number of times this year has had Blu-Ray 2-for-1 sales.

And of course, June 2-6 is "High Definition" week on Amazon's Gold Box.

Big Father's Day push for Blu-Ray at Wal-Mart. Best Buy is said to be matching the deal.

By definition, I cannot link to sunday circulars in my paper... as Father's Day draws closer we'll see more.

Just look around, at papers and others sources. Promotions continue, right now is the time when places are slowly ramping up promotions for Father's Day and so it's a little quieter right now than normal.

Re:you haven't looked

[SuperKendall]

I am no fan of Blu-Ray, just a realist who likes movies.

The rest of the swearing and complete lack of refuting any points I have made just shows you have come unhinged - Frankly at this point I imagine your supposed "Blu-Ray player" to be a cardboard box with Calvenesque "Blu-Ray" scrawled on the side in crayon. If you did buy one, perhaps that is the root of your deep despair.

I'll let you have the last response to engage in further proof-by-tourette as you wish, but I certainly feel no need to read your offensive lunatic rantings further.

Re:you haven't looked

[ergo98]

Just look around, at papers and others sources

Awesome stuff. Yes, idiot, I should have noticed a Walmart sale happening next week by following rumor sites for Walmart employees.

You are truly awesome, because I know that you are blissfully unaware of your stupidity.

Re:you haven't looked

[ergo98]

The rest of the swearing and complete lack of refuting any points I have made just shows you have come unhinged

You made a point somewhere? Nah, I don't think you actually have.

Grow up. The war is over, asshole. Go take up Mac zealotry or something.

H264

[Anonymous Coward]

If they had some sense, they'd use standard dvds with high def content encoded with h264 - and a network port of course :)

I don't get it

[Charcharodon]

They should have just come out with a format of 720p instead of getting into a pissing contest over 1080p. I would have been cheaper to develop for, and for the customer to upgrade to. Hell most 720p movies would have probably easily fit on a DVD (or two, or five for LotR director's cut) once you dumped all the pointles extras that noone watches more than once.

You're average home theater customer would have been thrilled and it all would have stuck with the planned obsolescence in five/ten years to sell us 1080p

Don't forget the dragon chip!

[Crazy Taco]

And don't forget China's infamous Dragon chip, which was their attempt to make their own domestic CPUs to avoid reliance on Western companies like AMD and Intel. The end result was that they created a chip equivalent to a (slow) 486, at approximately the same time Intel was bringing the Core 2 Duo to market.

New revenue stream?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Toshiba has figured out a way to extort money from Sony. Come up with a real competitor for Blue Ray and then Sony will fork over mega bucks ( oops ... I meant yen ) to stop development of the competition.

Care to back up those lies?

[SuperKendall]

Blu-ray players have gotten more expensive. In some cases, a lot more expensive

The PS3 has not got any more expensive.

The Sony BDP-S300 is not any more expensive.

You try to deceive by including the introduction of very expensive high-end Blu-Ray players from companies uncommitted before HD-DVD folded.

Blu-ray sales, paradoxically, have collapsed

Only if you think disc sales being lower from Christmas to the start of the year as an odd thing. In reality, Blu-Ray disc sales are now week to week generally about 9% of standard DVD sales and climbing. In anticipation of your next argument, Blu-Ray disc sales also long ago eclipsed online movie sales and growing more rapidly than that segment.

High definition media gets almost no attention

From who? Consumers are buying HD-TV's in droves. PS3 sales are up, along with Blu-Ray media sales. You may not care, but you are simply sticking your head in the sand to absorb the tears from the loss of your dear HD-DVD.

Retailers that used to push both Blu-ray and HD-DVD now push....nothing. I find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale.

Unless you go into Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target, etc. Now you are just a parody of yourself as anyone with even a sliver of shopping experience has seen Blu-Ray discs and players in big box stores.

Former HD-DVD supporters are so pathetically transparent...

I myself only got a Blu-Ray player at the beginning of the year, and have but a few discs - I have no great commitment to the format myself but can realize it's the next video format, just as it was easy to do before the war even started because of studio support.

However as marginal my own interest in the format may be, I cannot let complete fabrications by those who would damage the whole HD media market with outright slander and fabrications go unchecked. As a movie lover I would prefer the HD media market remain healthy so we get more good quality transfers. If you loved movies yourself you would abate your attacks which cause only harm, and for what - revenge on Sony? So not worth your time.

Re:Care to back up those lies?

[ergo98]

You try to deceive

....

Unbelievable.

Yes, all those media reports about Blu-ray prices going up -- it's all my secret agenda to deceive! All those media reports about Blu-ray player sales coming to a standstill -- it's all my secret agenda!

The fact that major electronic retailers no longer put any effort whatsoever into pushing high defintion -- it's all my secret agenda.

Extraordinary stuff.

Re:Care to back up those lies?

[SuperKendall]

Yes, all those media reports about Blu-ray prices going up -- it's all my secret agenda to deceive!

Well I posted links showing proof the basline costs have not gone up.

All you posted were words, whcih turned out to be fabrications - and all you issue in response is more words (without links) about nameless "media reports" which (of course!) support your position.

My apologies for calling you a liar, rather than a writer of fantasy. And I said nothing about your agenda being secret, you wear it on your sleeve with pride.

The fact that major electronic retailers no longer put any effort whatsoever into pushing high defintion -- it's all my secret agenda.

Any Sunday paper offers disproof of your "facts", or as I said actually going into stores.

Odd that you claim I am the "Unbelievable" one, when I offer links and ready proof of my assertions.

Re:Care to back up those lies?

[Tony Hoyle]

The fact that major electronic retailers no longer put any effort whatsoever into pushing high defintion

What the *hell* are you blathering about?

Every electronics store larger than a corner shop is pushing it like mad.. you can't *move* on the high street for salesmen trying to get you to buy their latest HD kit.

There's no money in DVD or SD any more.. the prices are too low - and the stores know it. The profit is in HD.

Re:Care to back up those lies?

[ergo98]

It is overwhelmingly obvious that I am talking specifically about high definition optical formats, or rather format -- blu-ray.

No, they *don't* push blu-ray. The fact that they sell high-definition televisions, usually coupled with high-def cable boxes, in no way says anything whatsoever about blu-ray.

No upgrade required

[SuperKendall]

Current players can play the movie on all future discs.

You have been misled by the last of the HD-DVD fanbois seeking to sink the entire video market in revenge for their inability to make rational choices.

Suddenly, all chinese and korean maker...

[DrYak]

...shouted a big "Damn" together.

And then got back to work to see how they could cram yet another standard in their CD/DVD/CVD/HD-DVD/BlueRay hybrid ultra-low cost devices.

More seriously :
TFA sounds like they decided to cram a hardware decoder chip with support for MPEG 4 ASP+AVC / H264 in addition to MPEG 2 into a DVD player and call that "a new standard".

Anything but BD

[heroine]

BD has been so persistently high in price like laserdisc, any competition would be good.

MIcrosoft and Apple have it right...

[lilfields]

I don't know why Toshiba would chase this medium, it will be dead much faster than DVD...the next medium is obviously digital downloads and as of now I'd say that Microsoft and Apple both have this market close at heart right now...between iTunes and the Live Marketplace. Once we get a larger proportion of high speed internet coverage (which will probably be a result of wireless coverage [ie Google? Verizon, AT&T]) The biggest beneficiaries of this will be Microsoft and DivX, because of their compression technologies...on the hardware side, Level 3 Communications and anyone with dark fiber will benefit. Sony and Toshiba are chasing an already doomed market...if I were Toshiba I would reevaluate my position and look towards making set-top boxes for such an adaption. If anyone wonders why Microsoft hasn't pushed Blu-Ray into their Xbox line, look no further than the Live marketplace. I'd expect in the next 5 years, HD for downloads will be as common as downloading from iTunes...Blu-Ray? More like Apple TV, TiVo or Xbox.

To anyone who says that we still need a portable medium for market laggards (example: Grandparents)(other portable mediums will probably be flash based/iPod, Zune), I'd expect they'd still be buying DVDs, that market isn't going to die anytime soon...I doubt they will be upgrading to Blu-Ray

Re:MIcrosoft and Apple have it right...

[Unipuma]

I don't know why Toshiba would chase this medium, it will be dead much faster than DVD... Well, as long as there is doubt about what the next medium is going to be, the obvious winner will indeed be downloads. This can therefor directly impact the sales of Bluray players, and of course the Playstation 3. And as you state, one of the biggest beneficiaries will be Microsoft (who also helped to drag out the deathstruggle of HD-DVD as long as possible).

Could it be that there is a financial incentive from Microsoft to Toshiba to have them keeping the movie-buying market in doubt, and therefor hinder the uptake of Bluray (and thus the Playstation)? This is all just wild speculation of course.

Then buy some other brand

[SuperKendall]

Blu-Ray, unlike HD-DVD, was never a one-company pony. Buy a Samsung Player if you are unable to separate your irrational hatred from practical buying decisions.

Re:Then buy some other brand

[N8F8]

I explained my rationale. EVERY Sony product I have purchased in the last decade has been a piece or crap, usually because of some DRM related feature or proprietary interface. The last was a pair of expensive MP3 players that could only be loaded with songs through a really crappy Sony software program and a nonstandard PC connector cord.

TV Series

[bill_mcgonigle]

Want to be able to ship many movies on a single disc... but that doesn't seem to be happening

I really hope some TV series start doing this - a season of 24 in SD on a single disc BluRay would work out just fine. It would be an interesting experiment to offer buyers an HD version on (I'm guessing here) 6 discs for $48 or 1 disc in SD for $24.

I'd prefer the smaller storage impact for that kind of programming. On the other hand, I saw Iron Man in digital projection and I might just have to buy a Blu-Ray player for it. :)

Perhaps UAC wasn't such a bad thing after all

[TravisO]

>> completely untrusted and there's no 'permit/allow' ability if you are even the system owner - you MUST accept whatever damage the BD software wants to do to your system.

Perhaps UAC wasn't such a bad thing after all

Cost of Blueray disks prohibitive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd happily pay $20 for BluRay movies at this point. And while Wal*Mart, Best Buy and the like are trying to sell movies for $35 a pop (and wondering why sales are so low) Amazon.com sells tons of BluRay movies for $20 or less. If Sony could just understand that it is not the player that we don"t want to buy, it's the much higher amount per movie that is prohibitive.

Why can't they just market the movies at Bestbuy, Walmart for 20. Personally I'm not into ordering movies online.

Looks like it's upgraded DVD

[Lucas123]

According to an article in Japanese Daily Yomiuri, it appears Toshiba decided to compete with upgraded DVD players and not a new high-def, blue laser format.

THIS IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

HD != Blu-ray

Yeah, they're pushing big screen TVs. Few, if any, are pushing Blu-ray. The GP is right on the money, and this is just Blu-ray dreaming.

Balls Out Boys!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Wii strokin' time!

Things of interest...

[TheNetAvenger]

1) MS demostrated HD VC1 content on regular DVDs over 4 years ago, then explaining that there was no need for higher density discs for HD content.

2) Blu-Ray may not be the winner we all seem to think, Sony jumping prices when HD-DVD pulled the plug wasn't something most of the Movie industry was too happy about.

3) Online HD content is ready, working, faster than going to Video Store. In terms of rental content Online distribution will be the leading HD source (As it already is, see XBox Live, etc) (VHS Rentals along with fitting a 2HR Movie on the tape is specifically what killed BetaMax)

4) Ownership of HD content is the only area that Blu-Ray has a chance, and even then most videophiles break and rip the content to HD servers - hence online distribution being the natural progression of even online purchased HD content in the upcoming year.

So if Toshiba's plan is to introduce a DVD player than can decode VC1 HD content natively, it would be a serious contender to Blu-Ray, especially since PCs could easily use the content as well with 10 year old DVD players.

The 'selling point' of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was not the extra capacity for the movies but the room for additional interactive content, which Blu-Ray had crap support for initially and is only now catching up to the maturity HD-DVD had at launch. If a Toshiba DVD could offer the Movie on a DVD in HD format, and do the usually 'extras' DVD for additional content, this would fit the current DVD model of distribution and be cheaper than Blu-Ray for distribution.

So this could fly and circumvent the still less than adapted Blu-Ray market, especially if the Toshiba VC1/MPEG4 HD DVDs have less DRM.

And the extra Blu-Ray DRM is what MS opposed and fought for Sony to remove, forcing MS to support HD-DVD which had less DRM for things like off Media playing, etc. -Ironically on SlashDot as much as people hate DRM, the same people seem to love Blu-Ray and hate MS, when it was MS that took a stand against Blu-Ray DRM for consumer interests. (MS forsees Video Distribution Servers in homes as standard, just as Audio CD are already ripped and distributed. MS PlaysForSure and Zune DRM even allows for computer to computer or device streaming inherently, even if the local device doesn't have the DRM rights, but the serving Computer does. This is how you can play Napster or other DRM content on XBox or Vista or via WMP11 on XP from any computer on your network, even if only one computer has the DRM subscription.)

Re:Things of interest...

[SuiteSisterMary]

Don't forget that what the Market wants isn't often what you'd think.

Back in the day, when we were still heady from defeating DivX (the physical disc, not what's now become Xvid) and still bandied about terms like 'day-and-date,' the Terminator 2 Ultimate DVD was released, in a rather nifty metal slipcover.

It was one of the first major DVDs released on the double-sided, dual-layer format. There were two complaints:

1: Older players couldn't deal with it.

2: NO DISC ART!

Re:Things of interest...

[TheNetAvenger]

1: Older players couldn't deal with it.

2: NO DISC ART!


1) This is would not pertain to a new consumer player, nor a PC that can read any DVD format (Even PC DVD drives from 1998)

2) Disc Art is seldom used in collections, people are use to it.

The Disc that you may be refering to with the T2 limited Edition that was HD on DVD, and required a PC to play it. It used VC1 and fit on a standard Dual-Layer DVD. T2 Extreme I believe.

It is the very example of what Toshiba may be up to, as the full HD movie easily fit on a single side of the Dual Layer DVD, and extras including the regular DVD quality were on another DVD.

As for T2 being the first dual-layer movie DVD, I don't think it was. Dual-Layer DVDs have been around as long as DVDs. To my knowledge every early model consumer DVD player supports dual-layer DVDs, as this was part of the specification, since longer playing DVD Movies in MPEG2 cannot fit in 4.5gb of space, thus requiring dual layer DVDs from the begining.

It is only writers that were limited to single layer writing initially.

Re:Things of interest...

[SuiteSisterMary]

The Disc that you may be refering to with the T2 limited Edition that was HD on DVD, and required a PC to play it. It used VC1 and fit on a standard Dual-Layer DVD. T2 Extreme I believe.

No. The disc I'm referring to is the T2 Ultimate Edition, released August 29 2000, UPC 1223610967b. It was one of the first actual releases (yes, the spec for DVD Video has always allowed for dsdl; that doesn't mean that all the early players could actually handle it.)

And I didn't say 'dual layer,' I said 'dual-sided, dual layered.' DVD-18.

Between the incompatibility and the outcry over disc art, it was almost immediately re-issued with two ssdl discs (two DVD-9s, in other words).

Are Japanese schools getting worse?

[supabeast!]

Weren't these guys supposed to commit suicide or at least demoted and moved to a windowless office after HD-DVD? Are the standards slipping at Japanese schools resulting in businessmen who keep on trucking after dishonoring themselves?

Re:Are Japanese schools getting worse?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Actually, dead-ended sararimen used to get moved to a windowed office; the Japanese term for them translates as 'beside the window tribe.'

Japanese companies have gotten a lot less reticent about firing people, these days.

Blu-ray is not Sony.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blu-ray is not Sony.

I call BS

[alexborges]

Weird thing saying that console piracy is somewhat harder.

Here in the third world, you go to any flea market and you can get anything but the very bleeding edge already cracked and ready to play cracked games.

Piracy works in favor of publishers, not against them. Or rather, in favor of brand-name recognition that, if played well, could mean more bussiness, not less.

I say for example, WoW probably does not need, at all, to sell the game. They could give it away and they wouldnt loose anything: you play on their servers and pay for access, not for the game.

And thats the way things are going to go now. Im not saying i like it, im just saying thats the way to make money nowadays and it circunvents whatever evil can be done to you through piracy (which wasnt much to begin with)

Re:I call BS

[Enderandrew]

Really, there is a flea market where you can buy an XBox 360, PS3 and Wii all modded to play cracked games?

Please let me know where, because I smell BS as well.

Almost everyone I have ever met in my life has pirated something on a computer. I don't a single person with a hacked console (aside from myself, and I did it more as a hobby).

Re:I call BS

[tibman]

I don't know about any of the newer consoles, but i can believe it. I spent some time in a "3rd world country" and almost all media/content were copies. I think you could find one original disk in a 100. Though that was with movies, audio cds, and computer games. Consoles are bigger, not readily transported, require TVs, and need constant power (no batteries/rechargables), which doesn't make them very popular in a 3rd world country (at least in my view).

But in regards to the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii, i don't seriously think anyone in a 3rd world country would even buy it, if there wasn't a source for the games. But if a disk copier wanted to break into that market, you better believe he'll make sure there are modded/hacked consoles available.

I Work For Sony, And I {HEART} HD-DVD

[ergo98]

Which only goes to prove video game console sales are about video games. Since when did it's movie playing abilities really matter?

It's just a value-add that makes justifying the purchase a little more palatable. The PS1 saw a lot of its success because many justified shelling out for it under the premise that it saved them the cost of a DVD player. Now for those who've considered the next generation who are in the market for a game machine (say when something like GTA IV comes out and it proves enticing, and you know that both machines are pretty much on par...but that PS3 also gives you a BR player...)

Hey ergo98, how is Sony's health plan?

Bizarre -- most of my other posts are by defensive Playstation humpers, desperately fending off any commentary that is less than fawning about their beloved. Now you call me a Sony employee. Bizarre.

This is clearly one of those topics where people have their tribes and they just want to hoist around a flag. You outta see that SuperKendal guy running around, face red with a cone of spittle flying from his odoriferous, rotting mouth.

Re:I Work For Sony, And I {HEART} HD-DVD

[donaldm]

The PS1 saw a lot of its success because many justified shelling out for it under the premise that it saved them the cost of a DVD player. Good post but a minor correction. The PS1 only played CD's not DVD's. The PS2 on the other hand played DVD's and you are right many people found that when the PS2 came out it was compatible in price to dedicated DVD players and in many cases actually cheaper, also having PS1 backwards compatibility helped as well. So having an item with "value add" is actually a good selling point.

I read many posts stating that DVD players are very cheap and why would I get a BD player? The choice of buying a standalone DVD (upscaling or otherwise) player or a BD player is up to the individual and their economic means however I personally would not buy either one unless there is some "value add" to the purchase.

A Hard Disk Drive (HDD) DVD player/burner/recorder (a HDD DB burner/player/recorder is too expensive for me at the moment) offers greater flexibility and therefore IMHO better value. Likewise a PS3 with it's BD, upscaling DVD, hard disk and it's ability to play games as well as it's internet and media capabilities leave a stand alone DVD player for dead even though it costs more. Still as I have mentioned before the choice is up to the individual.

Why Did Toshiba

[Mana Mana]

not dump, public domain all, or the majority of their HDDVD tech when it lost?

Can someone explain? Please.

I would have thought since they had nothing to lose:

- an all torpedoes be damned
- a salt the earth
- and it might do some good whilst something interesting might come of it approach,

would have been deployed.

I have never seen an insightful analysis on this point.

Re:Why Did Toshiba

[dangitman]

Because they might find something that is useful or sellable for some future use or product. Why would they just give their patents and IP away? It's also not theirs to give away, it was developed by a consortium of different companies. Toshiba never "owned" HD-DVD in the first place.

Re:Hello? Hey! Here I am!

[aqk]

>> I don't know a single person who's actually installed and used every version of Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Vista.

Not only all of the above, but Windows 3.0, Windows 2 and...(gasp!) Windows 1!
On a 640Kb PC-Limited ("Dell") 80286!
(BTW.. Win 1 and 2 sucked, compared to the old Apple-II... Come to think of it so did Win 3.0, and, umm... 'nuf said.)

Did I mention IBM's OS/2? Well, that's another (sad) story.
Oh, wait- I'm not "an American".

Re:Hello? Hey! Here I am!

[antek9]

Oh great, you installed all of those on "a 640Kb PC-Limited ("Dell") 80286!"? I, for one, welcome our Vista running fine on an 80286 overlords!

Re:Hello? Hey! Here I am!

[aqk]

LOL!
Of course I meant just Windows 1 & 2...

Come to think of it, the 286 may have had a meg or two of extended memory.
But I DID run Win 3.1 on a one-meg 386.
And it just may have run a bit faster than my current Vista on a 2GHz system with 2Gig RAM...

You're a moron

[hassanchop]

Lenovo was selling millions of PCs long before they purchased IBM's PC division.

IBM PC's. That IBM did the R&D for and licensed to Lenovo. Oh, you didn't know that? If you did, why would you bring up something that destroys your argument?

So your point fails, and my question goes unanswered.

Re:You're a moron

[cozziewozzie]

IBM PC's. That IBM did the R&D for and licensed to Lenovo. In 1998? Or in 1990, when they first started producing computers?

I'm sure you have a good link for this, cause I'll laugh if you don't.

In any case, Lenovo did their own research and is definitely investing a lot into research now, opening research centers in China, India, the US, and elsewhere.

Like I said, you start with cheap knockoffs and producing other people's designs, then you move over to researching yourself. That exactly was my point, whether you're too dumb to understand it or not.

Here's your link, choke on it

[hassanchop]

Suck it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Legend-Lenovo-IBM_Time_Line

That exactly was my point

No it wasn't, but both that point and the one you were orginially trying to make are moronic and destroyed.

So, now that you've been proven totally wrong, care to fuck off?

Thanks.

Re:Here's your link, choke on it

[cozziewozzie]

I'm missing the part that says that Legend PC used licensed IBM technology in 1998.

It just states that the IBM and Lenovo product lines were independent until the 2000s, which is exactly what I said.

Try again, I'll give you all the time you need.

No liar

[hassanchop]

I'm missing the part that says that Legend PC used licensed IBM technology in 1998.

Look harder or learn to read better? Just a thought.

It just states that the IBM and Lenovo product lines were independent until the 2000s, which is exactly what I said.

NO it doesn't, and NO you didn't. Not only are you wrong, you're a fucking liar now too. Not surprising.

Try again, I'll give you all the time you need.

I don't think there is enough time for me to teach you how to read adequately, so why would I waste it like that?

You're wrong AND now you're lying. Really, based on the stupidity and factual inaccuracy of your original posts and your intense defense of said stupidity and inaccuracy I should have expected it.

Re:No liar

[cozziewozzie]

Goodbye, troll!