Maybe I'm being think; I Am Not The Proverbial Slashdot Lawyer.
But how is this really different to the fact that I bought an XBox 360 that could output up to 720p over VGA, with non-upscaled DVD playback, but now I've performed a dashboard update I'm getting 1080p with upscaling?
AC is right; a standalone Blu-Ray player shouldn't have to cost more than a console that can do other things as well.
Except that we all know Sony has thrown out the idea of profitable hardware out the window with PS3, and tries to make money on the software instead. You can't do that as well when you're Pioneer.
My current bugbear with that one is that all of my US mates have got a serious envy for the fact that there's a HD-DVD copy of Harry Potter & The Goblet Of Fire on the shelf here, while I'm rather more concerned with the fact that at least they have machines that would play it; the XBox 360's add-on drive is like hen's teeth in the UK.
I only get to play in bursts of an hour or so, too. Games I've been playing a lot of on the 360 are mainly Project Gotham Racing 3 (none of the races are longer than about 10 minutes or so), Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved (old-school 2D shmup with fancy neon vectors, gets insanely hectic after about two minutes) and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfare (sensibly placed autosave points mean you can genuinely get somewhere in 20 minutes play, and the tactical pace means you don't need to be twitch genius on the aiming).
If you like your puzzle games, Hexic (from the guy who invented Tetris) is pretty damn good, but liable to go on a bit in the main mode. There are harder ones for when you don't have time, though. Zuma is also far better on the analogue pad than the PC's mouse controls, for my money, and allows you to save your position mid-game.
Personally, I think these stories of Sony being able to meet demand are great. Maybe they'll actually get a few over here to the UK at some point in the future.
Currently, I'm dismissing every Blu-Ray manufacturer apart from Sony's Playstation division. All standalone players put together are selling very, very badly even in comparison to Toshiba's standalone HD-DVD players, let alone the orders of magnitude larger sales the PS3 is making.
Panasonic and Samsung have been sold down the river by a very canny Sony, who have released a player that is every bit as good at video (substantially better than the Samsung), costs half as much and will play videogames too, once some decent ones come out.
I don't know where you get 500,000 Blu-Ray players from, sorry. Either it's a problem with the PS3, and there are rather more than a million of those, or it isn't. Non-PS3 players only number about 50,000, at the last estimate.
But that's by the by. Those players are all designed to read pre-recorded movies, and HD-DVD's 30Gb is more than you need with decent codec use. Most consumers seem to think that extras on a second disc is a good thing and means its a "real" special edition, so being able to fit them all on a single (more expensive to press) high-capacity disc is a false economy as far as the studios are concerned.
Firstly, reading a third layer may (MAY, Tosh are being hazy) be a firmware update, apparently.
But more importantly, 30Gb is more than enough to get a 3 hour movie in 1080p with lossless audio. Since pressing a third layer is going to be expensive, as is squeezing on that bit extra data per layer, I don't think it'll get used for movies for one minute.
I loved the Captain Crunch sequence, myself. I thought it said more about Randy's obsessive attention to detail, bordering on full-blown OCD, than simply telling us he has it.
We see the same with Lawrence, obviously, but unlike Randy he doesn't have the social capability to tone that down in public.
In particular, the retailers that NPD don't measure include non-traditional games shops like Walmart - the standard ratio they use to estimate sales there may well be off, given that Nintendo's machine is after a different market.
You don't get firmware updates. Which means that if your player's key is revoked (pretty unlikely, anyway; the player key responsible for this leak is almost certainly the one in PowerDVD for Windows) you're stuffed with new discs.
Also, it means that you won't get lovely improvements like the 5.1 TrueHD support that A1 and XA1 received with the 2.0 firmware.
For those that don't have a broadband connection, though, Toshiba will send you the latest firmware on a disc, which is nice of them.
Fortunately for the HD-DVD group, unlike with Blu-Ray it's part of the mandatory spec for the player to have a network connection and upgradeable firmware, partly for this reason.
M:i:III certainly is on two discs because the extras that aren't at 1080p are in MPEG-2. Isn't the Blu-Ray on two 25Gb discs, too? Certainly, as I remember it one of the two formats had to go to two discs, and so they put the other one a two-disc set just because Paramount realise that the average consumer thinks "Two Disc Set" means better value, even when everything would squeeze onto one disc if you tried; you see this all the time with DVD.
I'm correct about the video bitrate for Potter; it really is that low and really does look that good - Microsoft have made huge improvements in the VC-1 encoder. The studio has told the encoder to run at a particular constant quality (I forget which, but it's very high) and it comes out a lot smaller than you'd expect; compare it with earlier encodes like the US release of Serenity - the UK's video takes up less space now, but looks better. Some studios, allegedly, have been manually turning up the bitrate even further than that, not because it actually looks any different, but just so that people don't complain they're wasting disc space.
The Rings encode isn't signed off (I don't know the full details, but I suspect the ongoing fight between Jackson and New Line is involved) - you're right there. It's just that it's the longest film that's also the kind of huge blockbuster people care about, so the 3 hours 45 or whatever it is makes a good yardstick for how long you'd want to be able to get on a disc.
Do you know a way to make iTunes rip VBR files? I'm making everything AAC anyway, but my Dad can't use that, nor cope with the complexity involved in doing it all via EAC or similar.
The tech isn't going to ship with any Hollywood movies on it anytime soon because the amount of space used by the main movie on a dual-layer HD-DVD is currently going down (due to improvements in the encoder) faster than its going up due to decisions to tackle longer movies. We've already passed the point where The Return Of The King: Extended Edition leaves enough space for a fair smattering of extras; what more do you want?
I'm not the Grandparent, but yes game consoles are, for both formats. Over 95% of all Blu-Ray players are PS3s, and of the last figures I saw roughly two thirds of all HD-DVD players were XBox 360s.
You are right that many people don't know the 360's HD-DVD add-on exists. But many people actually looking to buy a HD movie format do, and they know that it's only £129, instead of £429 for the Toshiba HD-DVD player or £950 for the cheapest Blu-Ray in the UK. US numbers aren't quite as outlandishly different, but the add-on drive is still by far the cheapest way to get into HD movie buying.
You're absolutely correct, that is indeed what they are doing. Most of the really hated Blu-Ray titles are in MPEG-2. I've heard very mixed opinions of some of the H.264 encoders used by Blu-Ray production houses, too.
Put it this way, I fully expect Sony to try releasing a "Blu-Ray Superbit" range once they get the hang of encoding to a decent quality using the best codecs and a half-decent, less than a decade old master.
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, the most impressive HD movie transfer I have seen on either format, and 157 minutes long, has a video bit rate of 11.8 Mbit/s, or roughly 13.5 Gb for the film. Obviously you've got audio on top of that, which is one reason why it's still on a dual layer disc, extras being another.
OTA video looks worse because it hasn't been compressed as well (it's done on the fly, so that's hardly surprising).
Given that this bitrate would allow you to get around 4.5 hours of video with Dolby TrueHD audio alongside, would you agree that a 30Gb HD-DVD is "Good Enough" for movie use?
Blu-Ray was designed from the start as blank media, not pre-recorded, and for blanks 50Gb is indeed useful. But for the specific job of putting a single film at 1080p on a disc for home viewing, HD-DVD is fine.
HD-DVD is very much like a regular DVD, yes. You make it on the exact same manufacturing plant; the added capacity comes purely from using a higher laser frequency to allow closer pit placement. Just like regular DVD, the bits are in the middle of the disc.
Blu-Ray is made by placing the metal coating on the outside surface of the plastic disc, and then placing a thin layer of this TDK stuff over the top - it's mandated because if it wasn't there you could practically scrape the stuff clean off. That's how they get more per layer than HD-DVD; the data is that much closer to the lens. It also makes them an expensive pain to manufacture.
Your thinking isn't that far out at all. Which is why Fox are releasing not terribly long movies on 50Gb Blu-Ray discs with minimal extras.
The difference is that many Blu-Ray discs are encoded with poor old MPEG-2, which with its fixed 8-pixel-square macroblocks is old tech never designed for HD. Just about all HD-DVDs, and many new Blu-Ray discs are using MPEG-4 variants (usually H.264 for Blu-Ray, VC-1 for HD-DVD, though there is some crossover for both) which are several times as efficient; even at quality settings which completely shame the best MPEG-2 Blu-Ray discs the latest HD-DVDs are only using up 15-20Gb with the main video stream.
Sony appear to be in serious danger of shooting themselves with the Blu-Ray "trojan horse" idea.
Right now, 95% of all Blu-Ray players are PS3s, and that proportion seems to be going up not down. The other manufacturers, along with Sony's dedicated player division, are desperately fighting over the scraps. Discs are far more difficult (read: expensive) to make than HD-DVD, even at single-layer, because the process wasn't designed for pre-recorded discs; BD was going to be a HD recorder format first and foremost.
Everything seems to be loss-leading everything else, and the dedicated players that make a profit just aren't selling to pay it all off.
Backtracking to the beginning of the debate, the Wii is massively outselling the PS3. This was justified on the grounds that the PS3 isn't being manufactured in large numbers, and so is constantly out of stock.
If those big piles of boxes were constantly selling and being replaced, then Sony would have big sales figures to crow about. They don't. Ergo, they aren't selling out.
It's one thing for someone like you with specialist ripping tools on a minority OS to be able to rip with impunity.
Because I don't like being annoyed with pop-up nonsense when I stick discs in, the first thing I do when I install Windows is turn off autoexec. After that little trick, all of my discs so far have ripped perfectly well through iTunes - not something you'd consider a particularly oblique strategy.
HD-DVD is in a similar situation to Blu-Ray, except more so, if anything. Right now, some embarrassingly large percentage of HD-DVD players are the XBox 360 HD-DVD add-on drive (though not quite as many as the 95%+ of all Blu-Ray players that are PS3s). These 360s are outputting the HD signal over analogue output, because there IS no digital output on the 360.
So turning on ICT would break the HD image for the majority of viewers; a pretty silly thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm being think; I Am Not The Proverbial Slashdot Lawyer.
But how is this really different to the fact that I bought an XBox 360 that could output up to 720p over VGA, with non-upscaled DVD playback, but now I've performed a dashboard update I'm getting 1080p with upscaling?
AC is right; a standalone Blu-Ray player shouldn't have to cost more than a console that can do other things as well.
Except that we all know Sony has thrown out the idea of profitable hardware out the window with PS3, and tries to make money on the software instead. You can't do that as well when you're Pioneer.
My current bugbear with that one is that all of my US mates have got a serious envy for the fact that there's a HD-DVD copy of Harry Potter & The Goblet Of Fire on the shelf here, while I'm rather more concerned with the fact that at least they have machines that would play it; the XBox 360's add-on drive is like hen's teeth in the UK.
I only get to play in bursts of an hour or so, too. Games I've been playing a lot of on the 360 are mainly Project Gotham Racing 3 (none of the races are longer than about 10 minutes or so), Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved (old-school 2D shmup with fancy neon vectors, gets insanely hectic after about two minutes) and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfare (sensibly placed autosave points mean you can genuinely get somewhere in 20 minutes play, and the tactical pace means you don't need to be twitch genius on the aiming).
If you like your puzzle games, Hexic (from the guy who invented Tetris) is pretty damn good, but liable to go on a bit in the main mode. There are harder ones for when you don't have time, though. Zuma is also far better on the analogue pad than the PC's mouse controls, for my money, and allows you to save your position mid-game.
Personally, I think these stories of Sony being able to meet demand are great. Maybe they'll actually get a few over here to the UK at some point in the future.
Currently, I'm dismissing every Blu-Ray manufacturer apart from Sony's Playstation division. All standalone players put together are selling very, very badly even in comparison to Toshiba's standalone HD-DVD players, let alone the orders of magnitude larger sales the PS3 is making.
Panasonic and Samsung have been sold down the river by a very canny Sony, who have released a player that is every bit as good at video (substantially better than the Samsung), costs half as much and will play videogames too, once some decent ones come out.
I don't know where you get 500,000 Blu-Ray players from, sorry. Either it's a problem with the PS3, and there are rather more than a million of those, or it isn't. Non-PS3 players only number about 50,000, at the last estimate.
But that's by the by. Those players are all designed to read pre-recorded movies, and HD-DVD's 30Gb is more than you need with decent codec use. Most consumers seem to think that extras on a second disc is a good thing and means its a "real" special edition, so being able to fit them all on a single (more expensive to press) high-capacity disc is a false economy as far as the studios are concerned.
Firstly, reading a third layer may (MAY, Tosh are being hazy) be a firmware update, apparently.
But more importantly, 30Gb is more than enough to get a 3 hour movie in 1080p with lossless audio. Since pressing a third layer is going to be expensive, as is squeezing on that bit extra data per layer, I don't think it'll get used for movies for one minute.
I loved the Captain Crunch sequence, myself. I thought it said more about Randy's obsessive attention to detail, bordering on full-blown OCD, than simply telling us he has it.
We see the same with Lawrence, obviously, but unlike Randy he doesn't have the social capability to tone that down in public.
In particular, the retailers that NPD don't measure include non-traditional games shops like Walmart - the standard ratio they use to estimate sales there may well be off, given that Nintendo's machine is after a different market.
You don't get firmware updates. Which means that if your player's key is revoked (pretty unlikely, anyway; the player key responsible for this leak is almost certainly the one in PowerDVD for Windows) you're stuffed with new discs.
Also, it means that you won't get lovely improvements like the 5.1 TrueHD support that A1 and XA1 received with the 2.0 firmware.
For those that don't have a broadband connection, though, Toshiba will send you the latest firmware on a disc, which is nice of them.
Fortunately for the HD-DVD group, unlike with Blu-Ray it's part of the mandatory spec for the player to have a network connection and upgradeable firmware, partly for this reason.
M:i:III certainly is on two discs because the extras that aren't at 1080p are in MPEG-2. Isn't the Blu-Ray on two 25Gb discs, too? Certainly, as I remember it one of the two formats had to go to two discs, and so they put the other one a two-disc set just because Paramount realise that the average consumer thinks "Two Disc Set" means better value, even when everything would squeeze onto one disc if you tried; you see this all the time with DVD.
I'm correct about the video bitrate for Potter; it really is that low and really does look that good - Microsoft have made huge improvements in the VC-1 encoder. The studio has told the encoder to run at a particular constant quality (I forget which, but it's very high) and it comes out a lot smaller than you'd expect; compare it with earlier encodes like the US release of Serenity - the UK's video takes up less space now, but looks better. Some studios, allegedly, have been manually turning up the bitrate even further than that, not because it actually looks any different, but just so that people don't complain they're wasting disc space.
The Rings encode isn't signed off (I don't know the full details, but I suspect the ongoing fight between Jackson and New Line is involved) - you're right there. It's just that it's the longest film that's also the kind of huge blockbuster people care about, so the 3 hours 45 or whatever it is makes a good yardstick for how long you'd want to be able to get on a disc.
Ta muchly - somehow I've always missed the Custom setting.
Now, to go back and re-rip 40Gb worth of music or not...
"Apple's mp3 encoder works really well, too."
Do you know a way to make iTunes rip VBR files? I'm making everything AAC anyway, but my Dad can't use that, nor cope with the complexity involved in doing it all via EAC or similar.
The tech isn't going to ship with any Hollywood movies on it anytime soon because the amount of space used by the main movie on a dual-layer HD-DVD is currently going down (due to improvements in the encoder) faster than its going up due to decisions to tackle longer movies. We've already passed the point where The Return Of The King: Extended Edition leaves enough space for a fair smattering of extras; what more do you want?
I'm not the Grandparent, but yes game consoles are, for both formats. Over 95% of all Blu-Ray players are PS3s, and of the last figures I saw roughly two thirds of all HD-DVD players were XBox 360s.
You are right that many people don't know the 360's HD-DVD add-on exists. But many people actually looking to buy a HD movie format do, and they know that it's only £129, instead of £429 for the Toshiba HD-DVD player or £950 for the cheapest Blu-Ray in the UK. US numbers aren't quite as outlandishly different, but the add-on drive is still by far the cheapest way to get into HD movie buying.
You're absolutely correct, that is indeed what they are doing. Most of the really hated Blu-Ray titles are in MPEG-2. I've heard very mixed opinions of some of the H.264 encoders used by Blu-Ray production houses, too.
Put it this way, I fully expect Sony to try releasing a "Blu-Ray Superbit" range once they get the hang of encoding to a decent quality using the best codecs and a half-decent, less than a decade old master.
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, the most impressive HD movie transfer I have seen on either format, and 157 minutes long, has a video bit rate of 11.8 Mbit/s, or roughly 13.5 Gb for the film. Obviously you've got audio on top of that, which is one reason why it's still on a dual layer disc, extras being another.
OTA video looks worse because it hasn't been compressed as well (it's done on the fly, so that's hardly surprising).
Given that this bitrate would allow you to get around 4.5 hours of video with Dolby TrueHD audio alongside, would you agree that a 30Gb HD-DVD is "Good Enough" for movie use?
Blu-Ray was designed from the start as blank media, not pre-recorded, and for blanks 50Gb is indeed useful. But for the specific job of putting a single film at 1080p on a disc for home viewing, HD-DVD is fine.
HD-DVD is very much like a regular DVD, yes. You make it on the exact same manufacturing plant; the added capacity comes purely from using a higher laser frequency to allow closer pit placement. Just like regular DVD, the bits are in the middle of the disc.
Blu-Ray is made by placing the metal coating on the outside surface of the plastic disc, and then placing a thin layer of this TDK stuff over the top - it's mandated because if it wasn't there you could practically scrape the stuff clean off. That's how they get more per layer than HD-DVD; the data is that much closer to the lens. It also makes them an expensive pain to manufacture.
Your thinking isn't that far out at all. Which is why Fox are releasing not terribly long movies on 50Gb Blu-Ray discs with minimal extras.
The difference is that many Blu-Ray discs are encoded with poor old MPEG-2, which with its fixed 8-pixel-square macroblocks is old tech never designed for HD. Just about all HD-DVDs, and many new Blu-Ray discs are using MPEG-4 variants (usually H.264 for Blu-Ray, VC-1 for HD-DVD, though there is some crossover for both) which are several times as efficient; even at quality settings which completely shame the best MPEG-2 Blu-Ray discs the latest HD-DVDs are only using up 15-20Gb with the main video stream.
Sony appear to be in serious danger of shooting themselves with the Blu-Ray "trojan horse" idea.
Right now, 95% of all Blu-Ray players are PS3s, and that proportion seems to be going up not down. The other manufacturers, along with Sony's dedicated player division, are desperately fighting over the scraps. Discs are far more difficult (read: expensive) to make than HD-DVD, even at single-layer, because the process wasn't designed for pre-recorded discs; BD was going to be a HD recorder format first and foremost.
Everything seems to be loss-leading everything else, and the dedicated players that make a profit just aren't selling to pay it all off.
Backtracking to the beginning of the debate, the Wii is massively outselling the PS3. This was justified on the grounds that the PS3 isn't being manufactured in large numbers, and so is constantly out of stock.
If those big piles of boxes were constantly selling and being replaced, then Sony would have big sales figures to crow about. They don't. Ergo, they aren't selling out.
It's one thing for someone like you with specialist ripping tools on a minority OS to be able to rip with impunity.
Because I don't like being annoyed with pop-up nonsense when I stick discs in, the first thing I do when I install Windows is turn off autoexec. After that little trick, all of my discs so far have ripped perfectly well through iTunes - not something you'd consider a particularly oblique strategy.
HD-DVD is in a similar situation to Blu-Ray, except more so, if anything. Right now, some embarrassingly large percentage of HD-DVD players are the XBox 360 HD-DVD add-on drive (though not quite as many as the 95%+ of all Blu-Ray players that are PS3s). These 360s are outputting the HD signal over analogue output, because there IS no digital output on the 360.
So turning on ICT would break the HD image for the majority of viewers; a pretty silly thing to do.