They created an ad hoc group to explore options which never created a specification, had no noticable progress other than considering legal barriers and didn't even report at the most recent meeting of the steering committee. That's doesn't really add up to "HD-DVD was getting [region encoding] too."
Really hard to assess, since I don't think there are any titles available in both straight HD-DVD as well as combo. The latest Harry Potter was a combo, though, and sold well relative to the BD release (52:48 if memory serves).
As for space considerations, it's true that there are fewer HD DVD discs with lossless audio. On the other hand support for the leading lossless formats (TrueHD and DTS HD) is optional in the BD spec, which means the majority of lossless tracks on BD are simply uncompressed LPCM. It's not unlike how the majority of released titles are still in MPEG-2. It may change in the future, but as it stands the extra bandwidth and capacity in Blu-ray are usually wasted with less efficient encoding.
For audio the base spec of BD is actually pretty lame. The only mandatory codecs are AC-3, DTS and LPCM in contrast to HD-DVD which requires AC-3, DD EX, DD+, TrueHD, DTS and LPCM. And frankly, without superhuman hearing and audio equipment well outside the price range of most people, there isn't going to be a perceptible difference.
That's not to say no discs made good use of the extra space. The Blu-ray edition of the latest Harry Potter, for example, had all extras encoded in 1080p while the HD DVD release was 480p. The HD DVD release had some special features of it's own, of course, including in-movie pop-ups not possible on BD before profile 1.1 and internet features not possible on BD before profile 2.0 (no players on the market yet, one model announced by Panasonic but without a release date).
One thing in the HD DVD camp that was interesting that along side the 51GB capacity discs ratified at the end of last year they also specified a composite disc with two HD layers (34GB total) and one SD layer (4.5GB) which would enable easier release of combo discs (current releases are dual sided).
It will be interesting to see what happens over the next month or so. There is a ton of inertia behind the format still. Toshiba has been projecting about five million HD DVD equipped notebooks in 2008 and will obviously continue marketing their standalone players. Hewlett Packard had just announced desktops also shipping with drives. Several vendors just announced dual format BD/HD DVD players. What's going to happen with all the hardware already in the production pipeline? If they do push it at "fire sale" prices could that inadvertantly generate enough of an install base to warrant reconsideration?
Not going to pretend the future is rosy for HD DVD. Any chance they have of recovery is slim at best. On the other hand I think a lot of the Blu-ray cloud are expecting that HD DVD is going to be out of the picture practically overnight and I somehow doubt it will be that quick.
Assuming any of the hardware vendors can actually make enough sales to ramp up volume production. The relative success of the PS3 (as a Blu-ray player, at least) is a double-edged sword. It's pushed a ton of players onto the market that otherwise wouldn't have been sold, but it also "steals" sales from standalone players. So far as I know there's not a single model of the standalone players that has broken 100k and the closest one was also from Sony.
Without a crystal ball it's impossible to tell, but I suspect that sales of HD media are going to continue to falter regardless of whether HD DVD manages to hold on or fade away. I simply don't buy that "confusion" was the predominant barrier to adoption.
The problem is that 50GB (or even 100GB when media and compatible show up) isn't massive in terms of desktop storage anymore. Entry level machines are coming with 250GB drives and desktop drives of 1TB are only going to become more common. Even assuming BD writers and media come down in price significantly they're still be far slower (even 4x media is still only about 18MB/s, even commodity hard drives are 2-3 times faster on streaming writes) and less convienent (want to sit feeding a machine discs ever half hour?).
My comments were about optical storage as a backup medium, so your response really doesn't apply to anything I said.
That said, network delivery of HD content is nowhere near that far off, I suspect. Desktop style computers have nothing to do with it though. Cable companies are already providing their customers with high capacity set top boxes that can handle HD video. It's hardly a huge leap from current PPV and VoD systems to selling movies.
It isn't strange at all. It was explicitely stated at the Blu-ray press conference just yesterday. They don't want to "sacrifice the space on the disc."
If the BDA had any intention of pursuing that as a strategy they would have actually ratified the dual-format discs as a standard. Instead it's three years later and there is no standard, much less shipping titles.
At this point I'd venture that the basics are pretty well set. HDMI is the interface, ATSC and QAM are the standards, etc. The latest iteration of the standards for VoD and PPV without leasing a set top box is still up in the air (new version called "tru2way" was just announced) but I'm not sure I would wait for that.
Beyond that, it's all just bells and whistles. New types of backlighting, higher refresh rates, wider color gamuts and so forth. Wait for that and you'll never buy.:)
Mind you I'm only upgrading soon because I expect old models will be on clearance after the new ones announced at CES come out and my current ten year old set is a bit beat up - scan line travelling the scene that's all too noticeable sometimes, busted component inputs - and I already bought an HD DVD player when my regular player went tits up (for $89.99 + 7 free movies, seemed silly to pass up) and an HD DVR (cable company switched to them exclusively, also provides free HD channels with the service).
With high capacity external drives so cheap, I have to wonder if optical as a mainstream backup medium is dead. Of course there will always be power users who need the storage, but are they enough to make 100GB discs a volume item or will most people buy 25GB to master home video projects to?
Not sure how this will effect the overall market, but in my case it pretty much ended my interest in HDM. I was never willing to pay a premium price for either format if it wasn't backwards compatible, so I'm going to continue buying HD DVD combo discs when possible but otherwise stick to DVD. The Blu-ray camp has stated repeatedly they're not interested in producing combo discs so I'm not interested in their format, even if they do eventually price players closer to what I'm willing to pay (from the CES announcements it sounds like even cheap chinese players are being priced around $300).
The blu camp definitely sponsered a large number of sales, including direct discounts by Disney. I wouldn't base media cost on sale prices though.
As for quality difference, the majority of the BD catalog is actually encoded in MPEG-2 still, so they get markedly worse picture quality despite the higher bandwidth. The VC-1 and AVC encodings are done at virtually the same bitrate otherwise, since 1080p simply doesn't need that high a data rate to represent a high fidelity picture.
About the only thing the extra bandwidth is "needed" for is lossless audio with a large number of channels. Personally I think that lossless audio is just the latest dick-waving contest for people with too much money. In terms of perceptible quality it buys you nothing. About the only place it actually makes sense is if you plan on transcoding formats and want to avoid introducing artifacts (which is why my music collection is encoded lossless).
That assumes every consumer wants the gaming system. Believe it or not the gaming capabilities are of no value to some consumers. Not everyone games, and plenty of other people are happy with their Wii, 360 or PS2. Even in the case of a PS3 household a person doesn't necessarily want to replace all their DVD players with a console.
I was personally looking forward to replacing my DVD players as they died with HD DVD units for less than half the price of the PS3. The change of allegiance makes that somewhat less attractive now, but I've been sticking to combo discs anyways.
Personally I think the whole idea of trying to force a wholesale switch to HDM is stupid. Most people have multiple players and they're not going to switch them all to *any* new format overnight, especially since they can't in a number of cases (no in-car units, no portable units, no option for most notebook computers, etc).
If I were a strategist in the HD DVD camp right now I think I would be pushing the studios to start issuing all release as combo discs and shift the advertising campaigns to stress the fact that you can buy the discs knowing they will play anywhere ("including Blu-ray players!").
2. Be a year late to market, more expensive than competition, and overall the worst selling console, losing billions of dollars (after selling millions of units at a loss).
The long and short of it is that Sony sacrificed profitability in their gaming division to wrest control of the HD media market. Probably good business on their part, but not necessarily in the best interest of the consumers.
Why exactly are you comparing two last gen players? The HD-A3 is $179.98, and the Panasonic DMP-BD30K (the only shipping 'final spec' BD standalone) is $414.99. From the announcements at CES it sounds like the gap will be narrowing shortly (with reasonable playerrs running $350 and crap off-brands around $300), but Toshiba still has a significant price advantage.
It may not be standard, but DVD systems in "family" vehicles are edging towards being a standard feature. And plenty of families that don't have it as a factory option have after-market (can be had easily for about $150) or portables (widely below $100). It's hardly a luxury item anymore.
(And plenty more homes have multiple DVD players.. One in the living room, maybe one in a family room, maybe one or more in bedrooms, one in pretty much every computer in the house, etc. My grand total is seven, which is why I only buy DVD or HD DVD combo.)
No, outdated BD hardware that's still on the market is runnin $299. The only two current players run $399 (PS3) and ~ $420 (Panasonic DMP-BD30K). A current gen HD-DVD runs about $170 (HD-A3) or $250 (HD-A30) if you care about 1080p.
I hadn't noticed any particular different in media costs, myself. Some of the combo discs were priced at a bit of a premium (maybe $5 more from what I saw) but certainly less than buying a second copy. Between standalone units, computers and portables I have seven DVD players. No way am I replacing those all at once, if I do at all.
My preference for HD is based on the lack of region-coding, a finalized spec before shipping product and cost (especially since retooling production lines for HD DVD is significantly cheaper than BD, which means media costs likely drop quicker with mass adoption for HD DVD). The larger raw capacity and bandwidth are largely immaterial considering the data rate needed for 1080p/24 video and quality audio. It's like buying an eight seat SUV as a commuter car.
They outsold every week, but the trend was that the gap was narrowing rather than widening from a peak of 70:30 in April to an end ratio of 64:36 (not 61:39).
If you trend out the weekly ratios the end of the year actually showed the largest sustained dip in BD's lead.
As for as whether Warner made the right decision... Hard to say, maybe it will spur adoption. On the other hand the players are still priced well outside the casual purchase range for most people ($400+ aside from last gen liquidation), the subsidized PS3 prevents anyone from Sony ramping up volume production and driving down cost, profile confusion may cause ill will or hesitance with consumers, people who already invested in HD-DVD may simply stop buying HD media entirely, etc.
Overall I think the decision was premature. The cost differential between formats (over $100 in current street prices) is high enough I'm not convinced the current overlap in the market is all that high. Would have made more sense in my opinion to continue supporting both formats through the 2008 calendar year.
I paid $100 for a good upscaling player that also happens to do HD-DVD and came with 300 and Bourne Identity, which I wanted to see anyways, and a handful of other DVDs which included some reasonable titles (most notable Full Metal Jacket). Did I waste my money?
Frankly, this just reinforces my decision to only buy combo discs if at all. Which means, since I've never heard of BD combo in the wild, I'll be buying plain jane DVDs from Warner in the future.
They're not issuing the coupons immediately because they're not in stores yet. From the FAQ on the site:
Consumers who apply at the beginning or 2008 will receive their coupons when TV converter boxes are
expected to be available in retail stores, probably in late February or early March.
As for cost... with minimal competition there are models out there for about $80 now. With a number of new competitors entering the market and the cutover providing a guaranteed volume market it doesn't seem unlikely that there will be a number of $40-50 options available.
For the record, from this casual observer's view, Blu-Ray is doing a much better job in brand recognition. Perhaps it is the catchy name, since HD-DVD sounds more like a spec than it does a product?
Actually, according to data released by NPD back in September only 20% of their poll respondants were aware of Blu-ray compared to 29% who were aware of HD DVD. And a poll of new HDTV owners conducted by TDG in December indicated 43% expressed interest in owning HD DVD compared to 27% for Blu-ray.
Sony is pushing Blu-ray awareness, though, and the Playstation 3 will submarine the format into a number of living rooms regardless of whether they had discrete interest in it. And it may be too early to tell whether Disney's "Magical Blu-ray Tour" in fall made a noticeable difference in awareness.
Because I don't want to be faced with repurchasing a chunk of my movie collection or trawling the used market a few years down the line when one of my players goes tits up and I can't buy a new one because the format lost. Seems pretty simple to me.
(I actually have an HD-DVD player now, since I ran across a good deal when I needed a new player anyways, but I will only purchace combo discs for the foreseeable future. For compatability with our other six DVD players as well as hedging my bets.)
But since those were one-man efforts, they two had to build off of previous work, and so you can't run Perl or Python on most non-*nix systems.
You should maybe check your facts.
From the Python website: "Python runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, OS/2, Amiga, Palm Handhelds, and Nokia mobile phones. Python has also been ported to the Java and.NET virtual machines."
And the list of binary distributions from the Perl website: Acorn, AIX, Amiga, Apollo, Apple, Atari, AtheOS, BeOS, BSD, BSD/OS, Coherent, Compaq, Concurrent, Cygwin, Darwin, DEC OSF/1, DG/UX, Digital, Digital UNIX, DJGPP, DOS, Domain/OS, DragonFlyBSD, DYNIX/ptx, Embedix, EMC, EPOC, FreeBSD, Fujitsu, GNU Darwin, Guardian, HP, HP-UX, IBM, IRIX, Japanese, JPerl, Linux, LynxOS, Mac OS, Mac OS X, Macintosh, MachTen, MinGW, Minix, MiNT, MorphOS, MPE/iX, MS-DOS, MVS, NetBSD, NetWare, NEWS-OS, NextStep, NonStop, NonStop-UX, Novell, ODT, Open UNIX, OpenBSD, OpenVMS, OS/2, OS/390, OS/400, OSF/1, OSR, Plan 9, Pocket PC, PowerMAX, Psion, QNX, Reliant UNIX, RISCOS, SCO, Sequent, SGI, Sharp, Siemens, SINIX, Solaris, SONY, Stratus, Sun, Syllable, Symbian, Tandem, Tivo, Tru64, Ultrix, UNIX, Unixware, VMS, VOS, Win32, WinCE, Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, z/OS.
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They created an ad hoc group to explore options which never created a specification, had no noticable progress other than considering legal barriers and didn't even report at the most recent meeting of the steering committee. That's doesn't really add up to "HD-DVD was getting [region encoding] too."
"Blu-ray supports region encoding."
HD-DVD was getting it too.
Have a source for that?
Really hard to assess, since I don't think there are any titles available in both straight HD-DVD as well as combo. The latest Harry Potter was a combo, though, and sold well relative to the BD release (52:48 if memory serves).
As for space considerations, it's true that there are fewer HD DVD discs with lossless audio. On the other hand support for the leading lossless formats (TrueHD and DTS HD) is optional in the BD spec, which means the majority of lossless tracks on BD are simply uncompressed LPCM. It's not unlike how the majority of released titles are still in MPEG-2. It may change in the future, but as it stands the extra bandwidth and capacity in Blu-ray are usually wasted with less efficient encoding.
For audio the base spec of BD is actually pretty lame. The only mandatory codecs are AC-3, DTS and LPCM in contrast to HD-DVD which requires AC-3, DD EX, DD+, TrueHD, DTS and LPCM. And frankly, without superhuman hearing and audio equipment well outside the price range of most people, there isn't going to be a perceptible difference.
That's not to say no discs made good use of the extra space. The Blu-ray edition of the latest Harry Potter, for example, had all extras encoded in 1080p while the HD DVD release was 480p. The HD DVD release had some special features of it's own, of course, including in-movie pop-ups not possible on BD before profile 1.1 and internet features not possible on BD before profile 2.0 (no players on the market yet, one model announced by Panasonic but without a release date).
One thing in the HD DVD camp that was interesting that along side the 51GB capacity discs ratified at the end of last year they also specified a composite disc with two HD layers (34GB total) and one SD layer (4.5GB) which would enable easier release of combo discs (current releases are dual sided).
It will be interesting to see what happens over the next month or so. There is a ton of inertia behind the format still. Toshiba has been projecting about five million HD DVD equipped notebooks in 2008 and will obviously continue marketing their standalone players. Hewlett Packard had just announced desktops also shipping with drives. Several vendors just announced dual format BD/HD DVD players. What's going to happen with all the hardware already in the production pipeline? If they do push it at "fire sale" prices could that inadvertantly generate enough of an install base to warrant reconsideration?
Not going to pretend the future is rosy for HD DVD. Any chance they have of recovery is slim at best. On the other hand I think a lot of the Blu-ray cloud are expecting that HD DVD is going to be out of the picture practically overnight and I somehow doubt it will be that quick.
Assuming any of the hardware vendors can actually make enough sales to ramp up volume production. The relative success of the PS3 (as a Blu-ray player, at least) is a double-edged sword. It's pushed a ton of players onto the market that otherwise wouldn't have been sold, but it also "steals" sales from standalone players. So far as I know there's not a single model of the standalone players that has broken 100k and the closest one was also from Sony.
Without a crystal ball it's impossible to tell, but I suspect that sales of HD media are going to continue to falter regardless of whether HD DVD manages to hold on or fade away. I simply don't buy that "confusion" was the predominant barrier to adoption.
The problem is that 50GB (or even 100GB when media and compatible show up) isn't massive in terms of desktop storage anymore. Entry level machines are coming with 250GB drives and desktop drives of 1TB are only going to become more common. Even assuming BD writers and media come down in price significantly they're still be far slower (even 4x media is still only about 18MB/s, even commodity hard drives are 2-3 times faster on streaming writes) and less convienent (want to sit feeding a machine discs ever half hour?).
My comments were about optical storage as a backup medium, so your response really doesn't apply to anything I said.
That said, network delivery of HD content is nowhere near that far off, I suspect. Desktop style computers have nothing to do with it though. Cable companies are already providing their customers with high capacity set top boxes that can handle HD video. It's hardly a huge leap from current PPV and VoD systems to selling movies.
It isn't strange at all. It was explicitely stated at the Blu-ray press conference just yesterday. They don't want to "sacrifice the space on the disc."
If the BDA had any intention of pursuing that as a strategy they would have actually ratified the dual-format discs as a standard. Instead it's three years later and there is no standard, much less shipping titles.
At this point I'd venture that the basics are pretty well set. HDMI is the interface, ATSC and QAM are the standards, etc. The latest iteration of the standards for VoD and PPV without leasing a set top box is still up in the air (new version called "tru2way" was just announced) but I'm not sure I would wait for that.
:)
Beyond that, it's all just bells and whistles. New types of backlighting, higher refresh rates, wider color gamuts and so forth. Wait for that and you'll never buy.
Mind you I'm only upgrading soon because I expect old models will be on clearance after the new ones announced at CES come out and my current ten year old set is a bit beat up - scan line travelling the scene that's all too noticeable sometimes, busted component inputs - and I already bought an HD DVD player when my regular player went tits up (for $89.99 + 7 free movies, seemed silly to pass up) and an HD DVR (cable company switched to them exclusively, also provides free HD channels with the service).
HD DVD doesn't have a dash.
With high capacity external drives so cheap, I have to wonder if optical as a mainstream backup medium is dead. Of course there will always be power users who need the storage, but are they enough to make 100GB discs a volume item or will most people buy 25GB to master home video projects to?
Not sure how this will effect the overall market, but in my case it pretty much ended my interest in HDM. I was never willing to pay a premium price for either format if it wasn't backwards compatible, so I'm going to continue buying HD DVD combo discs when possible but otherwise stick to DVD. The Blu-ray camp has stated repeatedly they're not interested in producing combo discs so I'm not interested in their format, even if they do eventually price players closer to what I'm willing to pay (from the CES announcements it sounds like even cheap chinese players are being priced around $300).
The blu camp definitely sponsered a large number of sales, including direct discounts by Disney. I wouldn't base media cost on sale prices though.
As for quality difference, the majority of the BD catalog is actually encoded in MPEG-2 still, so they get markedly worse picture quality despite the higher bandwidth. The VC-1 and AVC encodings are done at virtually the same bitrate otherwise, since 1080p simply doesn't need that high a data rate to represent a high fidelity picture.
About the only thing the extra bandwidth is "needed" for is lossless audio with a large number of channels. Personally I think that lossless audio is just the latest dick-waving contest for people with too much money. In terms of perceptible quality it buys you nothing. About the only place it actually makes sense is if you plan on transcoding formats and want to avoid introducing artifacts (which is why my music collection is encoded lossless).
That assumes every consumer wants the gaming system. Believe it or not the gaming capabilities are of no value to some consumers. Not everyone games, and plenty of other people are happy with their Wii, 360 or PS2. Even in the case of a PS3 household a person doesn't necessarily want to replace all their DVD players with a console.
I was personally looking forward to replacing my DVD players as they died with HD DVD units for less than half the price of the PS3. The change of allegiance makes that somewhat less attractive now, but I've been sticking to combo discs anyways.
Personally I think the whole idea of trying to force a wholesale switch to HDM is stupid. Most people have multiple players and they're not going to switch them all to *any* new format overnight, especially since they can't in a number of cases (no in-car units, no portable units, no option for most notebook computers, etc).
If I were a strategist in the HD DVD camp right now I think I would be pushing the studios to start issuing all release as combo discs and shift the advertising campaigns to stress the fact that you can buy the discs knowing they will play anywhere ("including Blu-ray players!").
The long and short of it is that Sony sacrificed profitability in their gaming division to wrest control of the HD media market. Probably good business on their part, but not necessarily in the best interest of the consumers.
Why exactly are you comparing two last gen players? The HD-A3 is $179.98, and the Panasonic DMP-BD30K (the only shipping 'final spec' BD standalone) is $414.99. From the announcements at CES it sounds like the gap will be narrowing shortly (with reasonable playerrs running $350 and crap off-brands around $300), but Toshiba still has a significant price advantage.
It may not be standard, but DVD systems in "family" vehicles are edging towards being a standard feature. And plenty of families that don't have it as a factory option have after-market (can be had easily for about $150) or portables (widely below $100). It's hardly a luxury item anymore.
(And plenty more homes have multiple DVD players.. One in the living room, maybe one in a family room, maybe one or more in bedrooms, one in pretty much every computer in the house, etc. My grand total is seven, which is why I only buy DVD or HD DVD combo.)
No, outdated BD hardware that's still on the market is runnin $299. The only two current players run $399 (PS3) and ~ $420 (Panasonic DMP-BD30K). A current gen HD-DVD runs about $170 (HD-A3) or $250 (HD-A30) if you care about 1080p.
I hadn't noticed any particular different in media costs, myself. Some of the combo discs were priced at a bit of a premium (maybe $5 more from what I saw) but certainly less than buying a second copy. Between standalone units, computers and portables I have seven DVD players. No way am I replacing those all at once, if I do at all.
My preference for HD is based on the lack of region-coding, a finalized spec before shipping product and cost (especially since retooling production lines for HD DVD is significantly cheaper than BD, which means media costs likely drop quicker with mass adoption for HD DVD). The larger raw capacity and bandwidth are largely immaterial considering the data rate needed for 1080p/24 video and quality audio. It's like buying an eight seat SUV as a commuter car.
They outsold every week, but the trend was that the gap was narrowing rather than widening from a peak of 70:30 in April to an end ratio of 64:36 (not 61:39).
If you trend out the weekly ratios the end of the year actually showed the largest sustained dip in BD's lead.
As for as whether Warner made the right decision... Hard to say, maybe it will spur adoption. On the other hand the players are still priced well outside the casual purchase range for most people ($400+ aside from last gen liquidation), the subsidized PS3 prevents anyone from Sony ramping up volume production and driving down cost, profile confusion may cause ill will or hesitance with consumers, people who already invested in HD-DVD may simply stop buying HD media entirely, etc.
Overall I think the decision was premature. The cost differential between formats (over $100 in current street prices) is high enough I'm not convinced the current overlap in the market is all that high. Would have made more sense in my opinion to continue supporting both formats through the 2008 calendar year.
Actually VC-1 is used on only 28.05% of current releases. The predominant format is still MPEG-2 at 36.09% followed by AVC at 35.86%.
I paid $100 for a good upscaling player that also happens to do HD-DVD and came with 300 and Bourne Identity, which I wanted to see anyways, and a handful of other DVDs which included some reasonable titles (most notable Full Metal Jacket). Did I waste my money?
Frankly, this just reinforces my decision to only buy combo discs if at all. Which means, since I've never heard of BD combo in the wild, I'll be buying plain jane DVDs from Warner in the future.
They're not issuing the coupons immediately because they're not in stores yet. From the FAQ on the site:
Consumers who apply at the beginning or 2008 will receive their coupons when TV converter boxes are
expected to be available in retail stores, probably in late February or early March.
As for cost... with minimal competition there are models out there for about $80 now. With a number of new competitors entering the market and the cutover providing a guaranteed volume market it doesn't seem unlikely that there will be a number of $40-50 options available.
About 22.5 million.
Surely? Why the hell would I need to buy a new TV more than once a decade?
For the record, from this casual observer's view, Blu-Ray is doing a much better job in brand recognition. Perhaps it is the catchy name, since HD-DVD sounds more like a spec than it does a product?
Actually, according to data released by NPD back in September only 20% of their poll respondants were aware of Blu-ray compared to 29% who were aware of HD DVD. And a poll of new HDTV owners conducted by TDG in December indicated 43% expressed interest in owning HD DVD compared to 27% for Blu-ray.
Sony is pushing Blu-ray awareness, though, and the Playstation 3 will submarine the format into a number of living rooms regardless of whether they had discrete interest in it. And it may be too early to tell whether Disney's "Magical Blu-ray Tour" in fall made a noticeable difference in awareness.
Because I don't want to be faced with repurchasing a chunk of my movie collection or trawling the used market a few years down the line when one of my players goes tits up and I can't buy a new one because the format lost. Seems pretty simple to me.
(I actually have an HD-DVD player now, since I ran across a good deal when I needed a new player anyways, but I will only purchace combo discs for the foreseeable future. For compatability with our other six DVD players as well as hedging my bets.)
You should maybe check your facts.
From the Python website: "Python runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, OS/2, Amiga, Palm Handhelds, and Nokia mobile phones. Python has also been ported to the Java and
And the list of binary distributions from the Perl website: Acorn, AIX, Amiga, Apollo, Apple, Atari, AtheOS, BeOS, BSD, BSD/OS, Coherent, Compaq, Concurrent, Cygwin, Darwin, DEC OSF/1, DG/UX, Digital, Digital UNIX, DJGPP, DOS, Domain/OS, DragonFlyBSD, DYNIX/ptx, Embedix, EMC, EPOC, FreeBSD, Fujitsu, GNU Darwin, Guardian, HP, HP-UX, IBM, IRIX, Japanese, JPerl, Linux, LynxOS, Mac OS, Mac OS X, Macintosh, MachTen, MinGW, Minix, MiNT, MorphOS, MPE/iX, MS-DOS, MVS, NetBSD, NetWare, NEWS-OS, NextStep, NonStop, NonStop-UX, Novell, ODT, Open UNIX, OpenBSD, OpenVMS, OS/2, OS/390, OS/400, OSF/1, OSR, Plan 9, Pocket PC, PowerMAX, Psion, QNX, Reliant UNIX, RISCOS, SCO, Sequent, SGI, Sharp, Siemens, SINIX, Solaris, SONY, Stratus, Sun, Syllable, Symbian, Tandem, Tivo, Tru64, Ultrix, UNIX, Unixware, VMS, VOS, Win32, WinCE, Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, z/OS.