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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.
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...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.
Could you care to name which PC gaming houses you like went bankrupt? And some sort of evidence that this was due to piracy?