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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.
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?
Summation 2
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.
Ignore this signature. By order.
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...
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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.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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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?
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Could you care to name which PC gaming houses you like went bankrupt? And some sort of evidence that this was due to piracy?
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?
And what, it's your belief that technology is only going to slow down from here?
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.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer