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]

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[zippthorne]

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

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'

Gah

[TPJ-Basin]

Worst. Idea. Evar.

good news for microsoft

[OrochimaruVoldemort]

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

Details

[whisper_jeff]

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

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

Note to Hillary and Toshiba

[SputnikPanic]

It's over. Move on.

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.

Optical discs?

[Vlobulle]

I don't care anymore, SSD will probably become cheaper than Blu-Ray in a few years.

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: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?

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

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?

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:Really, what's the use?

[bilbravo]

6mm on each side? Really?

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: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: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:Really, what's the use?

[muzicman]

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

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: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).