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)

Standards

[youthoftoday]

How many standards do we need? The ISO should wade in and sort this out ... no wait.

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]

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?

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.

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...

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.

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: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: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.

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: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...