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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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'

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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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.

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?

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

[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

[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

[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.

Details

[whisper_jeff]

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

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

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?

[bilbravo]

6mm on each side? Really?

Note to Hillary and Toshiba

[SputnikPanic]

It's over. Move on.

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

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.

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.

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?

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: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.

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

[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: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?

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.