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

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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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.

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

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: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...

TFA misses the point

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually about DVD players with better upscalers. There is no new format or anything like that.

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: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

[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.

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

[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: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: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: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: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?

[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.

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: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: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.