That would have destroyed sales of the 360. Microsoft was absolutely right to keep the drive out of the console, it would have pushed prices up with very little net gain for the target demographic. PS3 users have been effectively paying a "Blu-ray tax" thanks to Sony making the opposite decision.
I think Microsoft went too far in its support for HD DVD. If, as seems likely, HD DVD does cease pushed as a mainstream format before the end of the year, I wonder if they'll reconsider the idiotic "secure path" crap they put in Vista, which has been widely blamed for Vista's problems? They put all of this in in the belief that this would help get Hollywood on-side with computer-managed high definition video, and HD-DVD in particular. With Blu-ray not making managed copy compulsory, managed copy is effectively dead, meaning the only thing left as far as Vista's DRM issues go is basic playback. If Microsoft yanked all of this from Vista, would the AACS at least concede to some degree in licensing a few non-secure path Blu-ray playback tools, or would they be content to see Blu-ray effectively illegal to view on post- and pre-Vista based Windows computers?
Ok, so you're apparently trolling. You're really proposing I should spend money on something I don't want rather than money on something I do, because the thing I do want is not going to be popular in the future even if it's what I want now? And rather than come up with reasons, you're pretending that any of my issues with Blu-ray have been dealt with.
Could you quote from anything I've written where I've said I think Blu-ray doesn't exist?
I'm interested in why you think I'm deluded however. In what way is Blu-ray substantially superior to DVD in a way clearly visible on my 32" LCD, so much so that it's worth me spending extra money on it over DVD, and worth the constant maintenance that goes with a system whose spec is constantly being updated and whose copy prevention system is so convoluted every few months discs come out incompatible with a substantial number of players?
His objection (if I'm reading him correctly) is similar to that of people who refuse to download any content that is shackled with DRM, for any price
Not really. It's a cost-benefit scenario.
Blu-ray offers one thing (and only one thing) over DVD, slightly improved video and audio. But it also has real downsides - constant firmware updates and the risk of incompatibility for new releases. Part of that is BD+, and part of that is that the Blu-ray spec seems to be in a state of constant flux. And it costs more money, and almost certainly always will.
I don't see any point in buying Blu-ray. DVD will always work without problems unlike Blu-ray, it's cheaper, and the difference in video and audio quality is just not great enough for most people to care, least of all me.
I think both analogies are wrong. Think of it this way: What's the difference between an airship traveling away from you and a 747 traveling towards you? In "Oh fuck, if we don't change direction we're toast" terms, nothing whatsoever.
Realistically, this will be dealt with by the usual ATC mechanisms, I can't see airships being any kind of major hazard, especially if, as seems likely, regular HTA aircraft will typically be flying at 30,000 feet, well above most airships.
Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray support red laser discs. What I'm saying is that for blue-laser media, only HD-DVD supports it in DRM-free form.
Yes, it's attractive in the sense that if you're doing a short movie and have little budget, it's technically possible to use. But that doesn't mean that every low budget movie is going to find the approach attractive. Do you really want to be forced to license AACS, or else ship two discs and force viewers to swap them in the middle of the movie, if you want to distribute a high-def movie that's more than a little under an hour and a half long?
Planes very rarely crash. If you do a "deaths per passenger mile" analysis of airship travel, the figures are far from impressive.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't fix it, especially given the era in which it was built it was one of the most complicated devices built at the time, and done so without the benefit of 21st Century knowledge and technology; but saying the Hindenberg didn't kill many people is dubious at best. There are many 747s that cross the Atlantic several times a day, and the number of deaths in the last, say, six years (the life of the Hindenberg) is, well, I don't think there were any. I can't recall a 747 crash in that time. The last 747 I can think of that crashed while trying to cross the Atlantic was Pan Am 103, and that was terrorism.
Is it a fair comparison? Well, no, of course we don't have many Zeppelins to compare to 747s. So the Hindenberg disaster could be considered a blip, but that said, it was one of the last disasters in a history of accident prone passenger airship travel.
I wish it was the only notable airship disaster. In fact, it was the last of a long line of accidents. One can probably make all kinds of judgements as to why the others failed - Britain's fledgling passenger airship program, for example, was ruined by the crash of the R101, an accident many feel happened because of politics and micromanagement by government as much as inherent airship stability.
Realistically, airship travel is not going to happen again on any serious level until the technology catches up with the lack of development it's been deprived of for the last 70 years. I suspect the only way to make it work is to put serious development into cargo transportation systems, and once the reliability and safety of these has been proven, to then move over to work on passenger travel. I don't think there's any reason why hydrogen has to be considered unsafe (any more than airline fuel), but clearly the last time any serious work was done in that area, it wasn't enough. If the same development processes are thrown at it as have been thrown at other forms of transportation, one would hope that the safety issues can be dealt with, at least to a point that airship travel is as safe as airline travel.
Are you in marketing? "similar capacities"? "most common forms"? I said different. They are not the same, therefore they are different.
If you're trying to raise points irrelevent to the comparison, then yeah, they're technically different. However, in practice, there are no serious differences in terms of capacity. The two formats require identical compression. A person ordered to produce both Blu-ray and HD-DVD forms of a movie is not going to have to spend twice as long doing it as they would just doing one. In practice there are no serious differences. In practice, that is, in the real world, where the producer is having to make technical decisions, they're going to do the same thing for both formats.
Are you saying that the market is split evenly at 50/50 and they will produce and sell an identical number of each units? There won't be any overhead, overruns, surplus production of either format? Or, to be less pedantic, are you saying that a given production house can nearly accurately forecast the number of sales of either given format for any given title over a period of time? Further, the fact that the production equipment is physically different and that there are licensing fees involved, etc. doesn't factor into your equation. Business 101.
No, I don't think I said any of that. And you're overstating a number of factors. Indeed, insofar as you're right, Warner Brothers is still better off producing some discs in HD DVD format rather than producing both formats, because HD DVD is slightly cheaper per disc.
Or do you think that if someone orders a couple of duplication plants to produce 30,000 HD DVD discs and 70,000 Blu-ray discs, they're going to have to spend considerably more money than if they order 100,000 Blu-ray discs? Because at those volumes (and we're not realistically looking at 100,000 for most releases, we're looking at numbers far in excess of that) the cost per disc isn't going to get any lower just because you order a few more of them.
You're overstating virtually everything in order to make it appear that dual format support is some kind of millstone around a publisher's neck. For very low volumes, it may well be, because the menu authoring is substantially different between the two formats. For the kinds of volume we're talking about here, the nearest thing there is to an issue is making sure the ratio of the two formats is about right.
It's considerably more expensive, and less convenient, to support DVD and VHS, and the studios were doing that for years.
Sorry, but your arguments are a tad misguided. DRM is a component of media conglomerates, not media storage formats. It will exist as long as the "War On Piracy" continues to rage on.
Fascinating, wrong, and completely irrelevent. Nobody's said DRM is going away. Blu-ray does support BD+, and BD+ appears to be a stupid, moronic, hack that has already caused problems for legitimate consumers.
But in the long run, I don't think you get it. You are not a typical consumer. You are nothing remotely resembling a typical consumer and the people responsible for producing these formats, I'm sorry to say, don't shive a git what your opinion is or where your wallet goes one way or another. Your arguments mean as much to a movie studio as the subtle nuances of rocket science mean to me. But this is Slashdot, so please don't hesitate to respond and tell me how one DRM format/requirement is subtly different than another or some other pedantry.
Your opinions don't matter to me any more than mine does to yours.
I don't actually like Blu-ray, and I will not be buying it. I don't want to constantly downloading firmware updates because the "latest release" of something I'm interested in has a BD+ (or whatever) hack on it that screws up playback on my player. I do, actually, want to buy movies that haven't been rel
Again, I have no intention of buying a Blu-ray player. Blu-ray is, using the benchmarks that matter to me, inferior to DVD. Given the choice between a $50 DVD player and a $51 Blu-ray player, I'll save the dollar. The chances of Blu-ray media being cheaper than DVD is so non-existant that it's not even worth mentioning.
So the future existance of Blu-ray discs containing content I'm interested in is completely, 100%, irrelevent. They might just as well not exist. I've said this multiple times, why do you persist in assuming that I would be better off spending money on a system I have no interest in instead of one I do?
Again, there is no sense in which I'm wasting money buying HD-DVD. An HD-DVD player plays a substantial library of movies in high-def I'm interested in, and also plays DVDs, which will continue to be the most popular, most widely available, library for the forseeable future, and does so well. There's no loss in buying HD-DVDs, they're going to play for as long as any DVD-type discs.
And, realistically, the HD-DVD library will increase in size for the next year or two at minimum, and this is assuming that HD-DVD "dies" as predicted by the Blu-ray partisans, with all major studios eventually dumping it, and that it doesn't continue to carve out a niche for other reasons - access by independent studios being an obvious example.
But what's on HD-DVD today is enough for me to be comfortable spending the money.
I would be wasting money on Blu-ray, for the same reason as I'd be wasting money by buying a DVD of Spiderman 3 ahead of Brazil.
I disagree. It's not "Early Adopters" who have "chosen" Blu-ray or HD-DVD. It's "Interested parties" who have done so, and done so for a variety of reasons, in Blu-ray's case in major part because their games console came with a Blu-ray player. "Early Adopter" is a term used for people who get hold of new technologies at a time they're new ahead of everyone else, but the overwhelming evidence is that this isn't one of those cases.
The people I've been talking to generally don't care about either format. They like DVD. Upconverted DVD looks fantastic on their spiffy new LCD HDTV sets. For either Blu-ray or HD-DVD to be attractive to them, it has to have advantages over DVD, and for the majority of consumers, neither format does, not because of competition issues, but because the hardware costs a small fortune, the discs cost a little more (albeit not much more), and the quality improvement is marginal.
That's the fundamental reason why consumers have picked DVD over both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and it's why proposing that this is somehow a matter of what the 3% of consumers who have actually gone high-def have "chosen" is a waste of time and fundamentally misleading. At this stage, until one or other of the formats can be slipped in under the radar (say, by making cheap, $99, boxes that are great DVD players and also support a high-def format), neither format looks set to be anything more than the next Laserdisc in comparison to DVD's VHS.
And yes, I'm aware consumer advice sites keep recommending everyone not buy anything until "the industry" chooses one format or the other, but I don't think that's actually translating into consumers actually doing just that, even if they say that as the "smart answer". Most people I've talked to do not even know there are multiple formats, if they've heard of the war at all.
The choice has not been made. If we're choosing what's going to replace the Laserdisc, and the studios decide that's really what they see hi-def as, then yeah, Blu-ray is probably what has the momentum. But if they're trying to replace the DVD, both formats are failures as of now, and that's not going to change until either the advantages of hi-def can be seriously promoted, or the pricing of a DVD player that supports a Hi-def format can be reduced to the point there's no advantage in buying something that only plays DVDs.
This is, frankly, hyperbole. Even WB is going to be releasing new content on HD-DVD for the next six months, so saying it's dead in a month or weeks is completely ridiculous. And that's ignoring the fact that other studios - not the majority, but nonetheless others - will continue to support it for some time.
The question I asked though was how am I wasting money? Even in a world in which new releases will not be available "in month if not weeks", there is a substantial library out there already. If those are movies I want to watch, and HD-DVD is a cost effective way to watch them in a way that suits me better than DVD or Blu-ray, then how am I wasting money buying HD-DVD?
Well, the consumers have only decided in the sense that they've rejected both and opted to stay with DVD. There are relatively few hi-def players out there. Even amongst backers of one format or the other (actually, Blu-ray, as I've not seen a store promoting HD DVD), I've walked into many stores and not seen a single player even as a demo unit and no indication they plan to have one.
This isn't because they're selling out - go to Best Buy or Wal*Mart, and there they are - it's because it's not worth the shelf space for most stores. People aren't buying either format except a dedicated group of HD enthusiasts and those who buy the Playstation 3 (for whatever reason, whether it's to play games, watch Blu-ray, or both.)
Blockbuster's figures, at this point, and definitely in June of last year, are really irrelevant. Until the hardware is in more homes, consumers will not have decided anything.
It's fun to root for the "underdog", but come on, people - this is your own money. Why waste it?
How am I wasting it? For reasons I described above, I don't plan to get a Blu-ray player at any time in the future, because it absolutely definitely is not what I want. To me, in terms of the benchmarks I set, it is inferior to the format it replaces.
HD-DVD I consider a superior format to DVD. So I benefit from buying a player that plays them and HD-DVD discs.
It is worth the money to me. HD-DVD players aren't expensive, they're going to be around for as long as people want them, and the catalog is large enough today that I can build a fair library, relatively cheaply.
For all the bluster about wasting money on "obsolete" formats, if the format does what you want, and it's priced low enough for you to feel is cost effective, why avoid it and buy something that's "current" but not what you want?
Are you saying it's not possible to create a non-DRM Blu-ray disc even if you wanted to? And that it's possible to do with HD-DVD?
Yes. AACS is an optional feature of HD-DVD discs, but a compulsory feature of (Blue laser) Blu-ray discs.
It is possible to master a type of red-laser (DVD) Blu-ray (data) format disc without AACS, but for obvious reasons this isn't exactly an attractive option.
Not only in film editing (different audio and video standards/capabilities, different media capacity),
Not in practice. Both formats have similar capacities in their most common forms (dual layer HD-DVD vs single layer Blu-ray), and use identical codecs. Only the additional rich content - the menus, etc, are different.
physical production, but in storage, shipping, handling and marketing costs for two formats while at the same time maintaining 'legacy' support in the form of DVDs.
Nope. The only way you're going to save in physical production, storage, shipping, and handling is if you reduce the number of units you sell, which of course results in a predictable reduction in revenues, so what are you gaining by doing this? You're treating this as if 100,000 Blu-ray discs take half as much storage as 50,000 Blu-ray discs and 50,000 HD-DVD discs. That's clearly not the case.
And the loss in revenue is WB's problem here, they are, at least in the short term, merely cutting the number of units shipped and sold, reducing their profits. Their hope is that by taking a side, others will fall in line with the same side and so in the long term their sales will rise again as consumers feel obliged to buy Blu-ray players and throw away their HD-DVDs. But see below on that.
And what marketing costs are you looking at that are saved by ditching HD DVD?
The other problem with the above is the "customers" and "decision" part. The common trend amongst the proletariat these days is "Just make up your damn minds and I'll buy whatever wins!" hence the necessity for the producers to have the final say.
Up to a point. I don't think this would have been an issue if studios had all supported both formats and had shown no signs of deciding that one was going to get better treatment than the other in future unless one did spectacularly badly.
Here's something worth bearing in mind: I'm not doing Blu-ray. I looked at the three formats a month or two ago, DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray, and decided that I felt HD-DVD was a clear step up from DVD, whereas Blu-ray was a step down. (For my logic, see here.) The studios "making the choice for me" doesn't mean I'm breathing a sigh of relief and rushing out to buy a Blu-ray drive, it means they'll be seeing less of my money, especially if they decide to drop DVD as well.
Hopefully the latter will not happen. Actually, hopefully the "war" isn't over yet.
It's not really over. There are still a number of studios, most notably Paramount, committed exclusively to HD-DVD. The situation is that more studios are currently in the Blu-ray corner.
What happens long term is still open, though the bias is towards Blu-ray at this point. HD-DVD's hardware is currently less expensive, so I suspect that the war will intensify over the next few months as the DVD forum, who are the promoters of HD-DVD, make a last big push to make it more available.
As an aside, I find the fact the studios are trying to decide on the format war somewhat depressing. It's hard to see how supporting both formats and allowing consumers to make the final choice is going to cause any serious level of expense. It's all the more depressing because, of the two, Blu-ray, with its compulsory DRM and continued use of region codes, is the more closed and that's what the majority of major studios have gone for. The net effect is that smaller studios are likely to be locked out of HD until a viable downloads system becomes available.
HD-DVD players are perfectly capable of playing plain-old-DVDs. There's really no downside to upgrading, beyond the risk that the format you choose (be it Blu-ray or HD-DVD) might be the one that fails.
So a show is unbiased if two segments of the show are clearly biased, and the others conform to some somewhat arbitrary benchmark about treatment of GOP and Democratic Party candidates?
It's not really subsidized in the usual sense of the word. The move to digital is to free up spectrum that's going to be auctioned off for mobile services. Some of the money from this will go to "subsidizing" the digital boxes (eg paying for the equipment needed, rather than forcing people to be inconvenienced or pay for the equipment themselves)
To use a really awful car analogy, because this is Slashdot, this is like a land-owner deciding that a valuable access road should be torn up so they can sell the land, and using some of the money from the resultant land sale to buy the inconvenienced residents their own helicopters.
FWIW, HD-DVD has gotten rid of the region encoding crap, and doesn't have the more stupid DRM schemes Blu-ray has like BD+ (which caused a lot of players to fall over playing certain recent releases.) There's not a lot of difference between HD-DVD and DVD except that AACS is slightly less breakable than CSS, and HD-DVD makes something called "managed copy" mandatory (this is a positive, not a problem, DVD didn't have any legal way of making copies of access-controlled content.) So in most senses, HD-DVD is more free (or rather less constrained) than DVD.
As far as phoning home goes, you don't have to hook either format up to the Internet. The discs sometimes contain extras that use an Internet connection, but any studio that insists that the main feature be unplayable without an internet connection would be shooting themselves in the foot - not every consumer has a suitable Internet connection. Even those hooked up typically have it connected to a computer without home-networking, and would need the assistance of their local geek to get their Blu-ray or HD-DVD player hooked up.
I would have expected both without the military becoming weaker (indeed, I expect both happening at a time when the military is getting stronger.)
Growth in GDP has generally massively out-paced inflation throughout most of the last 50 years. And the draft has been replaced by a volunteer army. The latter means higher quality men, and less of them, meaning less expenditure on troop levels while maintaining a consistently higher standard.
To extrapolate from either statistic that the military has gotten weaker strikes me as extraordinary. Both compared to its former self, and to its position in the world, the US military is unarguably the strongest it's ever been. There are good cases for actually cutting it at this stage, as it's strength has encouraged some of the nuttier elements in politics to involve this country in conflicts - or even start wars - where we can only, as a nation, ultimately lose credibility and goodwill.
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That would have destroyed sales of the 360. Microsoft was absolutely right to keep the drive out of the console, it would have pushed prices up with very little net gain for the target demographic. PS3 users have been effectively paying a "Blu-ray tax" thanks to Sony making the opposite decision.
I think Microsoft went too far in its support for HD DVD. If, as seems likely, HD DVD does cease pushed as a mainstream format before the end of the year, I wonder if they'll reconsider the idiotic "secure path" crap they put in Vista, which has been widely blamed for Vista's problems? They put all of this in in the belief that this would help get Hollywood on-side with computer-managed high definition video, and HD-DVD in particular. With Blu-ray not making managed copy compulsory, managed copy is effectively dead, meaning the only thing left as far as Vista's DRM issues go is basic playback. If Microsoft yanked all of this from Vista, would the AACS at least concede to some degree in licensing a few non-secure path Blu-ray playback tools, or would they be content to see Blu-ray effectively illegal to view on post- and pre-Vista based Windows computers?
Ok, so you're apparently trolling. You're really proposing I should spend money on something I don't want rather than money on something I do, because the thing I do want is not going to be popular in the future even if it's what I want now? And rather than come up with reasons, you're pretending that any of my issues with Blu-ray have been dealt with.
It's a silly argument, and you're a silly person.
Could you quote from anything I've written where I've said I think Blu-ray doesn't exist?
I'm interested in why you think I'm deluded however. In what way is Blu-ray substantially superior to DVD in a way clearly visible on my 32" LCD, so much so that it's worth me spending extra money on it over DVD, and worth the constant maintenance that goes with a system whose spec is constantly being updated and whose copy prevention system is so convoluted every few months discs come out incompatible with a substantial number of players?
Not really. It's a cost-benefit scenario.
Blu-ray offers one thing (and only one thing) over DVD, slightly improved video and audio. But it also has real downsides - constant firmware updates and the risk of incompatibility for new releases. Part of that is BD+, and part of that is that the Blu-ray spec seems to be in a state of constant flux. And it costs more money, and almost certainly always will.
I don't see any point in buying Blu-ray. DVD will always work without problems unlike Blu-ray, it's cheaper, and the difference in video and audio quality is just not great enough for most people to care, least of all me.
I didn't get a laserdisc player either...
I think both analogies are wrong. Think of it this way: What's the difference between an airship traveling away from you and a 747 traveling towards you? In "Oh fuck, if we don't change direction we're toast" terms, nothing whatsoever.
Realistically, this will be dealt with by the usual ATC mechanisms, I can't see airships being any kind of major hazard, especially if, as seems likely, regular HTA aircraft will typically be flying at 30,000 feet, well above most airships.
Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray support red laser discs. What I'm saying is that for blue-laser media, only HD-DVD supports it in DRM-free form.
Yes, it's attractive in the sense that if you're doing a short movie and have little budget, it's technically possible to use. But that doesn't mean that every low budget movie is going to find the approach attractive. Do you really want to be forced to license AACS, or else ship two discs and force viewers to swap them in the middle of the movie, if you want to distribute a high-def movie that's more than a little under an hour and a half long?
Planes very rarely crash. If you do a "deaths per passenger mile" analysis of airship travel, the figures are far from impressive.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't fix it, especially given the era in which it was built it was one of the most complicated devices built at the time, and done so without the benefit of 21st Century knowledge and technology; but saying the Hindenberg didn't kill many people is dubious at best. There are many 747s that cross the Atlantic several times a day, and the number of deaths in the last, say, six years (the life of the Hindenberg) is, well, I don't think there were any. I can't recall a 747 crash in that time. The last 747 I can think of that crashed while trying to cross the Atlantic was Pan Am 103, and that was terrorism.
Is it a fair comparison? Well, no, of course we don't have many Zeppelins to compare to 747s. So the Hindenberg disaster could be considered a blip, but that said, it was one of the last disasters in a history of accident prone passenger airship travel.
I wish it was the only notable airship disaster. In fact, it was the last of a long line of accidents. One can probably make all kinds of judgements as to why the others failed - Britain's fledgling passenger airship program, for example, was ruined by the crash of the R101, an accident many feel happened because of politics and micromanagement by government as much as inherent airship stability.
Realistically, airship travel is not going to happen again on any serious level until the technology catches up with the lack of development it's been deprived of for the last 70 years. I suspect the only way to make it work is to put serious development into cargo transportation systems, and once the reliability and safety of these has been proven, to then move over to work on passenger travel. I don't think there's any reason why hydrogen has to be considered unsafe (any more than airline fuel), but clearly the last time any serious work was done in that area, it wasn't enough. If the same development processes are thrown at it as have been thrown at other forms of transportation, one would hope that the safety issues can be dealt with, at least to a point that airship travel is as safe as airline travel.
If you're trying to raise points irrelevent to the comparison, then yeah, they're technically different. However, in practice, there are no serious differences in terms of capacity. The two formats require identical compression. A person ordered to produce both Blu-ray and HD-DVD forms of a movie is not going to have to spend twice as long doing it as they would just doing one. In practice there are no serious differences. In practice, that is, in the real world, where the producer is having to make technical decisions, they're going to do the same thing for both formats.
No, I don't think I said any of that. And you're overstating a number of factors. Indeed, insofar as you're right, Warner Brothers is still better off producing some discs in HD DVD format rather than producing both formats, because HD DVD is slightly cheaper per disc.
Or do you think that if someone orders a couple of duplication plants to produce 30,000 HD DVD discs and 70,000 Blu-ray discs, they're going to have to spend considerably more money than if they order 100,000 Blu-ray discs? Because at those volumes (and we're not realistically looking at 100,000 for most releases, we're looking at numbers far in excess of that) the cost per disc isn't going to get any lower just because you order a few more of them.
You're overstating virtually everything in order to make it appear that dual format support is some kind of millstone around a publisher's neck. For very low volumes, it may well be, because the menu authoring is substantially different between the two formats. For the kinds of volume we're talking about here, the nearest thing there is to an issue is making sure the ratio of the two formats is about right.
It's considerably more expensive, and less convenient, to support DVD and VHS, and the studios were doing that for years.
Fascinating, wrong, and completely irrelevent. Nobody's said DRM is going away. Blu-ray does support BD+, and BD+ appears to be a stupid, moronic, hack that has already caused problems for legitimate consumers.
Your opinions don't matter to me any more than mine does to yours.
I don't actually like Blu-ray, and I will not be buying it. I don't want to constantly downloading firmware updates because the "latest release" of something I'm interested in has a BD+ (or whatever) hack on it that screws up playback on my player. I do, actually, want to buy movies that haven't been rel
Again, I have no intention of buying a Blu-ray player. Blu-ray is, using the benchmarks that matter to me, inferior to DVD. Given the choice between a $50 DVD player and a $51 Blu-ray player, I'll save the dollar. The chances of Blu-ray media being cheaper than DVD is so non-existant that it's not even worth mentioning.
So the future existance of Blu-ray discs containing content I'm interested in is completely, 100%, irrelevent. They might just as well not exist. I've said this multiple times, why do you persist in assuming that I would be better off spending money on a system I have no interest in instead of one I do?
Again, there is no sense in which I'm wasting money buying HD-DVD. An HD-DVD player plays a substantial library of movies in high-def I'm interested in, and also plays DVDs, which will continue to be the most popular, most widely available, library for the forseeable future, and does so well. There's no loss in buying HD-DVDs, they're going to play for as long as any DVD-type discs.
And, realistically, the HD-DVD library will increase in size for the next year or two at minimum, and this is assuming that HD-DVD "dies" as predicted by the Blu-ray partisans, with all major studios eventually dumping it, and that it doesn't continue to carve out a niche for other reasons - access by independent studios being an obvious example.
But what's on HD-DVD today is enough for me to be comfortable spending the money.
I would be wasting money on Blu-ray, for the same reason as I'd be wasting money by buying a DVD of Spiderman 3 ahead of Brazil.
I disagree. It's not "Early Adopters" who have "chosen" Blu-ray or HD-DVD. It's "Interested parties" who have done so, and done so for a variety of reasons, in Blu-ray's case in major part because their games console came with a Blu-ray player. "Early Adopter" is a term used for people who get hold of new technologies at a time they're new ahead of everyone else, but the overwhelming evidence is that this isn't one of those cases.
The people I've been talking to generally don't care about either format. They like DVD. Upconverted DVD looks fantastic on their spiffy new LCD HDTV sets. For either Blu-ray or HD-DVD to be attractive to them, it has to have advantages over DVD, and for the majority of consumers, neither format does, not because of competition issues, but because the hardware costs a small fortune, the discs cost a little more (albeit not much more), and the quality improvement is marginal.
That's the fundamental reason why consumers have picked DVD over both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and it's why proposing that this is somehow a matter of what the 3% of consumers who have actually gone high-def have "chosen" is a waste of time and fundamentally misleading. At this stage, until one or other of the formats can be slipped in under the radar (say, by making cheap, $99, boxes that are great DVD players and also support a high-def format), neither format looks set to be anything more than the next Laserdisc in comparison to DVD's VHS.
And yes, I'm aware consumer advice sites keep recommending everyone not buy anything until "the industry" chooses one format or the other, but I don't think that's actually translating into consumers actually doing just that, even if they say that as the "smart answer". Most people I've talked to do not even know there are multiple formats, if they've heard of the war at all.
The choice has not been made. If we're choosing what's going to replace the Laserdisc, and the studios decide that's really what they see hi-def as, then yeah, Blu-ray is probably what has the momentum. But if they're trying to replace the DVD, both formats are failures as of now, and that's not going to change until either the advantages of hi-def can be seriously promoted, or the pricing of a DVD player that supports a Hi-def format can be reduced to the point there's no advantage in buying something that only plays DVDs.
This is, frankly, hyperbole. Even WB is going to be releasing new content on HD-DVD for the next six months, so saying it's dead in a month or weeks is completely ridiculous. And that's ignoring the fact that other studios - not the majority, but nonetheless others - will continue to support it for some time.
The question I asked though was how am I wasting money? Even in a world in which new releases will not be available "in month if not weeks", there is a substantial library out there already. If those are movies I want to watch, and HD-DVD is a cost effective way to watch them in a way that suits me better than DVD or Blu-ray, then how am I wasting money buying HD-DVD?
No it isn't. The author is saying that Paramount should look for ways out and speculates they will. I see nothing that says they actually are.
Well, the consumers have only decided in the sense that they've rejected both and opted to stay with DVD. There are relatively few hi-def players out there. Even amongst backers of one format or the other (actually, Blu-ray, as I've not seen a store promoting HD DVD), I've walked into many stores and not seen a single player even as a demo unit and no indication they plan to have one.
This isn't because they're selling out - go to Best Buy or Wal*Mart, and there they are - it's because it's not worth the shelf space for most stores. People aren't buying either format except a dedicated group of HD enthusiasts and those who buy the Playstation 3 (for whatever reason, whether it's to play games, watch Blu-ray, or both.)
Blockbuster's figures, at this point, and definitely in June of last year, are really irrelevant. Until the hardware is in more homes, consumers will not have decided anything.
How am I wasting it? For reasons I described above, I don't plan to get a Blu-ray player at any time in the future, because it absolutely definitely is not what I want. To me, in terms of the benchmarks I set, it is inferior to the format it replaces.
HD-DVD I consider a superior format to DVD. So I benefit from buying a player that plays them and HD-DVD discs.
It is worth the money to me. HD-DVD players aren't expensive, they're going to be around for as long as people want them, and the catalog is large enough today that I can build a fair library, relatively cheaply.
For all the bluster about wasting money on "obsolete" formats, if the format does what you want, and it's priced low enough for you to feel is cost effective, why avoid it and buy something that's "current" but not what you want?
Yes. AACS is an optional feature of HD-DVD discs, but a compulsory feature of (Blue laser) Blu-ray discs.
It is possible to master a type of red-laser (DVD) Blu-ray (data) format disc without AACS, but for obvious reasons this isn't exactly an attractive option.
LG produces dual-mode players. They're expensive, but they exist, so it's incorrect to suggest that anyone has refused to allow such a thing.
As for the second comment, it's a little more complex than that.
Not in practice. Both formats have similar capacities in their most common forms (dual layer HD-DVD vs single layer Blu-ray), and use identical codecs. Only the additional rich content - the menus, etc, are different.
Nope. The only way you're going to save in physical production, storage, shipping, and handling is if you reduce the number of units you sell, which of course results in a predictable reduction in revenues, so what are you gaining by doing this? You're treating this as if 100,000 Blu-ray discs take half as much storage as 50,000 Blu-ray discs and 50,000 HD-DVD discs. That's clearly not the case.
And the loss in revenue is WB's problem here, they are, at least in the short term, merely cutting the number of units shipped and sold, reducing their profits. Their hope is that by taking a side, others will fall in line with the same side and so in the long term their sales will rise again as consumers feel obliged to buy Blu-ray players and throw away their HD-DVDs. But see below on that.
And what marketing costs are you looking at that are saved by ditching HD DVD?
Up to a point. I don't think this would have been an issue if studios had all supported both formats and had shown no signs of deciding that one was going to get better treatment than the other in future unless one did spectacularly badly.
Here's something worth bearing in mind: I'm not doing Blu-ray. I looked at the three formats a month or two ago, DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray, and decided that I felt HD-DVD was a clear step up from DVD, whereas Blu-ray was a step down. (For my logic, see here.) The studios "making the choice for me" doesn't mean I'm breathing a sigh of relief and rushing out to buy a Blu-ray drive, it means they'll be seeing less of my money, especially if they decide to drop DVD as well.
Hopefully the latter will not happen. Actually, hopefully the "war" isn't over yet.
It's not really over. There are still a number of studios, most notably Paramount, committed exclusively to HD-DVD. The situation is that more studios are currently in the Blu-ray corner.
What happens long term is still open, though the bias is towards Blu-ray at this point. HD-DVD's hardware is currently less expensive, so I suspect that the war will intensify over the next few months as the DVD forum, who are the promoters of HD-DVD, make a last big push to make it more available.
As an aside, I find the fact the studios are trying to decide on the format war somewhat depressing. It's hard to see how supporting both formats and allowing consumers to make the final choice is going to cause any serious level of expense. It's all the more depressing because, of the two, Blu-ray, with its compulsory DRM and continued use of region codes, is the more closed and that's what the majority of major studios have gone for. The net effect is that smaller studios are likely to be locked out of HD until a viable downloads system becomes available.
HD-DVD players are perfectly capable of playing plain-old-DVDs. There's really no downside to upgrading, beyond the risk that the format you choose (be it Blu-ray or HD-DVD) might be the one that fails.
So a show is unbiased if two segments of the show are clearly biased, and the others conform to some somewhat arbitrary benchmark about treatment of GOP and Democratic Party candidates?
This is a new low in Fox News apologism.
It's not really subsidized in the usual sense of the word. The move to digital is to free up spectrum that's going to be auctioned off for mobile services. Some of the money from this will go to "subsidizing" the digital boxes (eg paying for the equipment needed, rather than forcing people to be inconvenienced or pay for the equipment themselves)
To use a really awful car analogy, because this is Slashdot, this is like a land-owner deciding that a valuable access road should be torn up so they can sell the land, and using some of the money from the resultant land sale to buy the inconvenienced residents their own helicopters.
DVD players have DRM too.
FWIW, HD-DVD has gotten rid of the region encoding crap, and doesn't have the more stupid DRM schemes Blu-ray has like BD+ (which caused a lot of players to fall over playing certain recent releases.) There's not a lot of difference between HD-DVD and DVD except that AACS is slightly less breakable than CSS, and HD-DVD makes something called "managed copy" mandatory (this is a positive, not a problem, DVD didn't have any legal way of making copies of access-controlled content.) So in most senses, HD-DVD is more free (or rather less constrained) than DVD.
As far as phoning home goes, you don't have to hook either format up to the Internet. The discs sometimes contain extras that use an Internet connection, but any studio that insists that the main feature be unplayable without an internet connection would be shooting themselves in the foot - not every consumer has a suitable Internet connection. Even those hooked up typically have it connected to a computer without home-networking, and would need the assistance of their local geek to get their Blu-ray or HD-DVD player hooked up.
I would have expected both without the military becoming weaker (indeed, I expect both happening at a time when the military is getting stronger.)
Growth in GDP has generally massively out-paced inflation throughout most of the last 50 years. And the draft has been replaced by a volunteer army. The latter means higher quality men, and less of them, meaning less expenditure on troop levels while maintaining a consistently higher standard.
To extrapolate from either statistic that the military has gotten weaker strikes me as extraordinary. Both compared to its former self, and to its position in the world, the US military is unarguably the strongest it's ever been. There are good cases for actually cutting it at this stage, as it's strength has encouraged some of the nuttier elements in politics to involve this country in conflicts - or even start wars - where we can only, as a nation, ultimately lose credibility and goodwill.
No, there was a hoax, a long time ago, about the Wii running some kind of Linux kernel, but it was debunked at the time by the hoax's author.
The Wii does not run Linux. If it did, either my Wii's manual would have a copy of the GPL in it, or Maddog would have sent in the lawyers by now.