Isn't it? If you are referring to Toshiba paying off Paramount to dump Blu-ray last summer, then I would agree with you but Warner denied there being a payoff. Toshiba and Paramount did not deny that money was exchanged to dump blu-ray despite there being a 2:1 sales lead for movie sales over HD DVD.
Who's taking it personally? I don't even know if you are really buying an HD DVD player or if you already own one and you just made everything up.
I don't care if you waste your money on a dead format but I just don't want a lot of over consumers being led astray with FUD. Sony cannot change something without the approval of the BDA. Google the BDA yourself or look on wikipedia. I've been saying that people should check out the situation for themselves rather than relying on the opinions of others on slashdot.
I was ridiculed and given infractions by mods over at AVSforum.com for pointing out this very fact that you could not buy internal HD DVD burners while internal and external Blu-ray burners were not only plentiful from several companies but that they now supported 2X writing of both write once (BD-R) and write/erase (BD-RE) while HD DVD burners were limited to 1X and found in select Toshiba laptops.
I had pointed out that Blu-ray had burners, set top BD recorders (in Japan), and BD recording camcorders coming out from Hitachi while HD DVD while HD DVD write support was limited to a handful of Toshiba devices with no camcorders in sight.
I believed BD would win because they were offering more choices for consumers and pro-sumer content creators.
Hey, for the price of a nice dinner for two I can now get an HD DVD player. I find it kinda funny that some people are buying these $3000 1080p tv's and they aren't springing for a HD DVD player. The picture IS that much better, no question. For the money I would rather buy a HD DVD player and have it be obsolete in a year or two than shell out more for the BR player now. If BR does completely take over, a coupla months later you will be able to get one for $50. Combined that is still less than the BR players now. Also you get 5 free movies with HD DVD players. On line rentals have hundreds of HD choices. Also if you buy a BR player now they will prolly make you buy a new one when they change the standard again. I find it funny that people are buying 3000 dollar TVs and complaining about a 50-70 dollar difference between Blu-ray and HD DVD players. Rentals will do nothing to push a format forward. Much like with consoles, the early adopters are going to pay a little more but even at those higher prices, the CE's are either going to barely make a profit or take a loss and they expect to make it up in royalties for disc sales. Toshiba is definitely taking a huge loss in their effort to stall HD Media adoption to protect their DVD format royalties. You are a pawn in their game pal.
It is the sale of movies on a format that drives its adoption and provides profits for the companies involved. I don't think you are seeing the big picture here. Your purchase of an HD DVD player with the intent to "rent" will mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. My purchase of close to 150 blu-ray titles in the period of 8 months on the other hand did count towards determining the victor in the war.
1. It has more content in various genres including family oriented films from Disney as a result of more Studio support.
2. More consumers are buying Blu-ray discs as opposed to HD DVD.
3. Blu-ray has more than one CE supporting the format with standalone players.
The different profiles allow CE's to have market segmentation and it give consumers a choice as to whether they want to pay extra for Picture in Picture or get a cheaper player just like how some TVs have pip while others don't.
4. Average people were confusing HD DVD with upscaling DVD players while Blu-ray is cemented into the minds of consumers as being a next gen replacement for DVD.
5. Blu-ray had superior advertising.
6. Blu-ray titles were usually cheaper than HD DVD's let alone HD DVD/DVD Combos even without the BOGO sales.
7. The BDA offered BOGO sales at brick and mortar and online stores in the US, Canada and Europe.
Many recent titles from Lionsgate, Fox, Disney and Sony have indeed used the extra space "and" bandwidth to give people a better quality picture along with lossless audio. For example, The Condemned offered up a VC-1 encode on Blu-ray that fluctuated between 30Mbits/sec to 43Mbits/sec bitrate which is way beyond what bandwidth HD DVD can offer. You cannot compare the quick ports Warner were doing from HD DVD to Blu-ray with the encodes specifically made for Blu-ray.
Those online extras had niche appeal. I have both a PS3 with close to a 150 titles and a HD-A2 with 19 HD DVDs so I have experience with both the HD DVD features and those of Blu-ray 1.1. I found the PIP extras to be extremely boring on both formats and preferred watching the main feature. I never bothered with the online stuff on HD DVD.
You are wrong. The opposite would have been true. Toshiba has a virtual monopoly on hardware players because of their scorch the earth discounting which chased away all of their partners over to the BDA side. I already noted that HD DVD title prices have been higher than Blu-ray up to this point. If Toshiba had won, they would have had a corner on the market for HD DVD playback and they would have jacked up prices to recover their losses from the war. There is competition on price and features/speed between blu-ray CE's. If you hate sony, look at buying a Panasonic BD30k. It is the fastest 1.1 standalone on the market.
Toshiba is Japanese for lemon. Why else would then have a lemon on all of their ads behind their logo? Do a search for Toshiba and Lemon and you will come up with a lot of hits.
From Beta to MiniDisc to Memory Stick, Sony never successfully pushes a format on the market. I can only conclude that BluRay will be supplanted by an as-of-yet-unrevealed third technology. My fragile worldview cannot accept any other alternatives. That was well executed man. A classic. LOL. The CD was as Sony/Phillips collaboration and that was really successful so Sony does not always fail.
I have tested a Profile 1.1 title on a Profile 1.0 blu-ray player (PS3 prior to 2.10 firmware update) and it played back fine. The menu gracefully omitted the 1.1 profile features and playback of the main feature was not affected. Once I upgraded to 2.10, the 1.1 profile features were available.
As for region codes, the lack of region codes on the HD DVD delayed several New Line releases for HD DVD behind the DVD and blu-ray release because HD DVD lacked region locking. None of that matters now that New Line is Blu-ray exclusive. I have over 80 titles in my blu-ray collection that are region free. Feel free to google for "region free blu-ray".
Yawn, I know exactly who developed what thanks - I've been in the industry since 1975. Some things I have a choice over some I don't. I drew a line in the sand and anything new from Sony after that date I avoid if at all possible. Any firm who are so DRM mad and own both the software and hardware side of the equation are liable to abuse that position and Sony have shown this in spades. Please. HD DVD's main supporters were Toshiba and MSFT. One had a OS monopoly on PCs and the other was pushing for a Hardware monopoly for HD DVD players. MSFT is one of the worst offenders of DRM. Consider that they have been pushing their music rental Janus software for years under the plays for sure label and now they are pushing new DRM locked into their Zune devices which do not even work with Playsforsure content. MSFT's goal has been to lock people into using windows with their DRM strategy, their DRM'ed managed copy scheme and with their Windows CE based HDi Technology used by HD DVD. Even the music players themselves do not work outside of windows as they use a proprietary protocal called MTP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol to transfer information. I don't give a rat's ass if some of you windows freaks got burned by a handful of CD's from Sony BMG (a company separate from Sony Pictures and Sony Electronics) as it did not affect me as a mac user. The poor decision of a music label to employ a poorly written DRM scheme should have no bearing on a mature adults decision as to what format to buy.
As I said, you have a choice of over a half a dozen CE's to choose a blu-ray player and Blu-ray is only partly owned by Sony. Just come clean once and for all and admit that you are an unabashed MSFT fanboy who is willing to overlook every DRM evil of MSFT but unwilling to overlook one mistake by a Sony owned music label.
I refuse to buy anything to do with Sony so I'm stuffed. I was really hoping HD-DVD would win out but it really does look like game over despite the clarification press release. So you refuse to use CD's as well then since they were developed by Phillips and Sony? What about DVD's given that Sony is a member of the DVD forum? Are you aware that Matsushita aka. Panasonic was one of the founders of Blu-ray along with Sony and that Panasonic probably owns more of the IP? Have you ever bothered googling any of this stuff or looking on wikipedia instead of spouting FUD all the time? Get over the Sony BMG rootkit already. Nobody except MSFT fanboys give a crap about than now as it's ancient history and Sony BMG went after the makers of the DRM in the courts.
If you don't want to buy Sony hardware for some irrational reason, then buy a Sharp, Pioneer, Panasonic, LG or Funai Blu-ray player instead of a Sony one. Chances are that even the Sony player's drive mechanism was made by Pioneer or Panasonic rather than Sony. Do us all a favor and google or search on wikipedia for the Blu-ray Disc association (the group behind the format) and educate yourself. Heck, even Toshiba will probably eventually make a blu-ray player.
I'm glad HD DVD did not win because Toshiba had a virtual Hardware monopoly and the disc format had inferior bandwidth and capacity compared to blu-ray.
The HD-DVD format allowed for DVD on one side, HD-DVD on the other... Blu-Ray? And, Blu-Ray is from Sony; arguably the second-most evil corporation (ahead of Microsoft, and just behind Disney).
Blu-Ray -- the Sony/Disney mashup from hell. Of course the other studios feel they have to jump on the bandwagon.
I liked the idea of buying DVD/HD-DVD in the same package... You are so full of it that I can smell you from here. Blu-ray was co-developed by Panasonic and Sony and Panasonic owner more of the patents and make more of the drive assemblies. Do you hate CDs too? After all, they were developed b Phillips and Sony. You like paying extra for Combos? Do you want to buy my Combos and HD DVDs?
That's all nice and all but what happens when you ISP decides to either cut you off or put a monthly download cap after checking your activity? You should not assume that your internet access is unlimited.
Both formats are irrelevant, its easier and cheaper to just download HD content. Who wants to mess around with discs? Do you think you could hook me up with your supplier of 100 MBit or faster internet access for really cheap? I don't think people who are buying 1080p TV's and either have no broadband available in their area or only have access to either Cable or DSL broadband are going to be interested in buying huge HDs to store all of the content, settle for heavily compressed 720p content with limited audio track options or wait for hours for the content to download.
How many Blue Ray disc sales are replacements?
If a Blue Ray disc is scratched there is no recovery, you cannot put it in a disc doctor like an HD-DVD, DVD or CD-ROM.
There is no scratch resistance in BlueRay discs.
This was such a problem that special coatings for the surface were developed just for use in BlueRay, however, everything gets scratched eventually; with BlueRay you need to buy another disc. FUD. The protective coating is specifically for scratch resistance. There is a very simple experiment that you can try that will only cost you under 20 dollars. Go find a copy of Total Recall on blu-ray which you should be able to find for 14 bucks or less in some stores. Now take that disc and try to abuse the surface with your keys, steel wool and razor blades. After you are done, find a friend with a standalone blu-ray or dual format player or a PS3 and try to playback the disc.
You will find that the disc plays back fine because no noticeable scratched appeared after all that abuse which was way beyond normal wear and tear. Please stop spreading FUD that you have heard from other HD DVD fanboys or paid shills.
Yes, but what if HD DVD wins and Blu-Ray goes the way of BetaMax? How exactly is that going to happen given that Blu-ray was created by a partnership between Panasonic and Sony with the former as the larger partner and now has all major CE's as licensees or BDA members save for Toshiba? To contrast that with HD DVD, Toshiba is the main patent holder and manufacturer of HD DVD drive assemblies and standalone units. Even some of the other brands of HD DVD standalones announced were just rebranded Toshiba units with slightly altered specs. It would seem to me that Sony learned from the BetaMax fiasco by involving/licensing the format to a wide variety of companies while Toshiba is repeating Sony's BetaMax mistake by trying to go it out alone and then alienating their partners by trying to undercut everyone on price by a wide margin.
The blu-ray format now has 70% of the major studio support exclusively whereas HD DVD has less than 30% given that there are some smaller studios such as Magnolia which are currently neutral. Given this development and Toshiba trying to sell players for 99 bucks and giving away 7-10 free movies but still being beaten by sales of blu-ray players for 300 dollars plus 5 free movies, how pray tell could they now possibly win? Have you every owned a Toshiba DVD player? They suck. I've heard of people recently tell of their Toshiba HD-A1 biting the dust the day of the Warner announcement. I went through two upscaling Toshiba DVD players and I'm not too happy with my HD-A2 DVD player either. I bought the player to have access to Universal titles but I fully expect the remaining studios to abandon HD DVD before the year is out.
BTW. Go to wikipedia and read up on each format and look at the comparison article there. You will learn how how Toshiba almost gave up a little over a year ago but MSFT convinced them to continue on. You will also learn there that outside of the US, blu-ray has a disc sales lead anywhere from 3:1 to 9:1.
I think these format wars will be moot in a few years due to the rise in Streaming Hi-Def.
Has anybody else used NetFlix Watch Instantly with a good connection? To me the video and sound look better than DVD. They also coming out with set-top boxes this year. Sure its DRM laden with a crummy selection, but it cost nothing on top of the normal service. How pray tell do all those people without the ability to even order broadband in their area do this? You are settling for DVD resolution and HD resolution streaming is not practical today.
For now, I'm waiting out the Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD war and loving my DVD Upconverting Player. The resolution is not as great as Blu-Ray or HD DVD, but it's an acceptable compromise. Besides, I can't afford to upgrade my existing DVD collection to either Blu-Ray or HD DVD discs.:( You do realize that blu-ray players will upconvert DVDs don't you? Nobody is expecting everyone to rebuy everything. I've been buying new releases that I wanted and catalogue titles that I did not own on DVD already.
The player you bought is artificially underpriced. Toshiba was trying to capture a hardware monopoly by selling below cost and makeup the money on disc royalties. The BDA group wanted to have a profitable business plan where prices would fall as economies of scale kicked in.
I feel sorry for you that you were tricked into buying hardware yesterday and that you cannot see how 7 to 10 free movies for a device that costs the same as the retail price of the movies is a big scam to product dump and lock you into Toshiba hardware and their HD DVD format.
If you really want to know more about the formats rather than FUD, check out wikipedia.org.
After all the tripe Michael Bay's given us, I'd doubt him if he said the sun comes up in the east. I bet you own every film he has directed. Cut the crap already. We all know you are just repeating that mantra to get karma.
Window Media player provides no revenue ands is provided in Europe sans WMP. Apple provides Quicktime Streaming Server for free as open source. Now consider the media products (hardware) and services (music/video stores) each company provides to consumers and how much revenue they derive from that. In the media distribution business, Apple dwarfs MSFT.
That was not only funny but insightful. Apple effectively crippled their patent trolling for future companies by invalidating most of them. I believe that it was cheaper to settle quickly, receive licenses for remaining existing patents and get an agreement for no future lawsuits on pending patents than to go after the remaining patents one by one.
What the hell are you talking about? Apple doesn't distinguish between "full version" and "upgrade" copies of OS X. There's only one type of Leopard retail box you can buy, and you can use that to install on a fresh new hard drive just as easily as you can upgrade a version of OS X already installed on the drive.
New Macs, on the other hand, come with a restore DVD, which usually works only with the model of Mac the disc originally accompanied. You are not getting it. The full version of OS X comes with the latest iLife available when you purchase new hardware. They do not distinguish between upgrade and "full versions" because they only sell one version and it is expected that your "mac" will have come with a previous version of OS X that are are "upgrading" from regardless of whether it is installed or not. Apple does actually distribute a "free" upgrade only version through the up to date program but again that is only available for people who purchased a mac close to the release of the new release.
Why is so hard for you to understand? The boxed version does not check to see if OS X is already installed but it does check to see if it is a mac and all macs come with an earlier version of OS X.
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As others have noted, the platters in your hard drive are shiny and the movies are stored as files on these shiny discs in Blu-ray format.
I don't care if you waste your money on a dead format but I just don't want a lot of over consumers being led astray with FUD. Sony cannot change something without the approval of the BDA. Google the BDA yourself or look on wikipedia. I've been saying that people should check out the situation for themselves rather than relying on the opinions of others on slashdot.
I had pointed out that Blu-ray had burners, set top BD recorders (in Japan), and BD recording camcorders coming out from Hitachi while HD DVD while HD DVD write support was limited to a handful of Toshiba devices with no camcorders in sight.
I believed BD would win because they were offering more choices for consumers and pro-sumer content creators.
It is the sale of movies on a format that drives its adoption and provides profits for the companies involved. I don't think you are seeing the big picture here. Your purchase of an HD DVD player with the intent to "rent" will mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. My purchase of close to 150 blu-ray titles in the period of 8 months on the other hand did count towards determining the victor in the war.
1. It has more content in various genres including family oriented films from Disney as a result of more Studio support.
2. More consumers are buying Blu-ray discs as opposed to HD DVD.
3. Blu-ray has more than one CE supporting the format with standalone players.
The different profiles allow CE's to have market segmentation and it give consumers a choice as to whether they want to pay extra for Picture in Picture or get a cheaper player just like how some TVs have pip while others don't.
4. Average people were confusing HD DVD with upscaling DVD players while Blu-ray is cemented into the minds of consumers as being a next gen replacement for DVD.
5. Blu-ray had superior advertising.
6. Blu-ray titles were usually cheaper than HD DVD's let alone HD DVD/DVD Combos even without the BOGO sales.
7. The BDA offered BOGO sales at brick and mortar and online stores in the US, Canada and Europe.
Many recent titles from Lionsgate, Fox, Disney and Sony have indeed used the extra space "and" bandwidth to give people a better quality picture along with lossless audio. For example, The Condemned offered up a VC-1 encode on Blu-ray that fluctuated between 30Mbits/sec to 43Mbits/sec bitrate which is way beyond what bandwidth HD DVD can offer. You cannot compare the quick ports Warner were doing from HD DVD to Blu-ray with the encodes specifically made for Blu-ray.
Those online extras had niche appeal. I have both a PS3 with close to a 150 titles and a HD-A2 with 19 HD DVDs so I have experience with both the HD DVD features and those of Blu-ray 1.1. I found the PIP extras to be extremely boring on both formats and preferred watching the main feature. I never bothered with the online stuff on HD DVD.
You are wrong. The opposite would have been true. Toshiba has a virtual monopoly on hardware players because of their scorch the earth discounting which chased away all of their partners over to the BDA side. I already noted that HD DVD title prices have been higher than Blu-ray up to this point. If Toshiba had won, they would have had a corner on the market for HD DVD playback and they would have jacked up prices to recover their losses from the war. There is competition on price and features/speed between blu-ray CE's. If you hate sony, look at buying a Panasonic BD30k. It is the fastest 1.1 standalone on the market.
Toshiba is Japanese for lemon. Why else would then have a lemon on all of their ads behind their logo? Do a search for Toshiba and Lemon and you will come up with a lot of hits.
He died of kidney failure.
As for region codes, the lack of region codes on the HD DVD delayed several New Line releases for HD DVD behind the DVD and blu-ray release because HD DVD lacked region locking. None of that matters now that New Line is Blu-ray exclusive. I have over 80 titles in my blu-ray collection that are region free. Feel free to google for "region free blu-ray".
As I said, you have a choice of over a half a dozen CE's to choose a blu-ray player and Blu-ray is only partly owned by Sony. Just come clean once and for all and admit that you are an unabashed MSFT fanboy who is willing to overlook every DRM evil of MSFT but unwilling to overlook one mistake by a Sony owned music label.
If you don't want to buy Sony hardware for some irrational reason, then buy a Sharp, Pioneer, Panasonic, LG or Funai Blu-ray player instead of a Sony one. Chances are that even the Sony player's drive mechanism was made by Pioneer or Panasonic rather than Sony. Do us all a favor and google or search on wikipedia for the Blu-ray Disc association (the group behind the format) and educate yourself. Heck, even Toshiba will probably eventually make a blu-ray player.
I'm glad HD DVD did not win because Toshiba had a virtual Hardware monopoly and the disc format had inferior bandwidth and capacity compared to blu-ray.
Blu-Ray -- the Sony/Disney mashup from hell. Of course the other studios feel they have to jump on the bandwagon.
I liked the idea of buying DVD/HD-DVD in the same package...
You are so full of it that I can smell you from here. Blu-ray was co-developed by Panasonic and Sony and Panasonic owner more of the patents and make more of the drive assemblies. Do you hate CDs too? After all, they were developed b Phillips and Sony. You like paying extra for Combos? Do you want to buy my Combos and HD DVDs?
Learn to use google, read and search wikipedia.
That's all nice and all but what happens when you ISP decides to either cut you off or put a monthly download cap after checking your activity? You should not assume that your internet access is unlimited.
If a Blue Ray disc is scratched there is no recovery, you cannot put it in a disc doctor like an HD-DVD, DVD or CD-ROM.
There is no scratch resistance in BlueRay discs.
This was such a problem that special coatings for the surface were developed just for use in BlueRay, however, everything gets scratched eventually; with BlueRay you need to buy another disc. FUD. The protective coating is specifically for scratch resistance. There is a very simple experiment that you can try that will only cost you under 20 dollars. Go find a copy of Total Recall on blu-ray which you should be able to find for 14 bucks or less in some stores. Now take that disc and try to abuse the surface with your keys, steel wool and razor blades. After you are done, find a friend with a standalone blu-ray or dual format player or a PS3 and try to playback the disc.
You will find that the disc plays back fine because no noticeable scratched appeared after all that abuse which was way beyond normal wear and tear. Please stop spreading FUD that you have heard from other HD DVD fanboys or paid shills.
The blu-ray format now has 70% of the major studio support exclusively whereas HD DVD has less than 30% given that there are some smaller studios such as Magnolia which are currently neutral. Given this development and Toshiba trying to sell players for 99 bucks and giving away 7-10 free movies but still being beaten by sales of blu-ray players for 300 dollars plus 5 free movies, how pray tell could they now possibly win? Have you every owned a Toshiba DVD player? They suck. I've heard of people recently tell of their Toshiba HD-A1 biting the dust the day of the Warner announcement. I went through two upscaling Toshiba DVD players and I'm not too happy with my HD-A2 DVD player either. I bought the player to have access to Universal titles but I fully expect the remaining studios to abandon HD DVD before the year is out.
BTW. Go to wikipedia and read up on each format and look at the comparison article there. You will learn how how Toshiba almost gave up a little over a year ago but MSFT convinced them to continue on. You will also learn there that outside of the US, blu-ray has a disc sales lead anywhere from 3:1 to 9 :1.
You don't have to take my word for it. Go to wikipedia.org here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc to read up on Blu-ray, history of the format and attempts made to avoid the format war here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Attempts_to_avoid_a_format_war . You can also read the comparison of the formats here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high_definition_optical_disc_formats . I'm not expecting you to believe me but I ask you to educate yourself and to stop spreading FUD.
I feel sorry for you that you were tricked into buying hardware yesterday and that you cannot see how 7 to 10 free movies for a device that costs the same as the retail price of the movies is a big scam to product dump and lock you into Toshiba hardware and their HD DVD format.
If you really want to know more about the formats rather than FUD, check out wikipedia.org.
Window Media player provides no revenue ands is provided in Europe sans WMP. Apple provides Quicktime Streaming Server for free as open source. Now consider the media products (hardware) and services (music/video stores) each company provides to consumers and how much revenue they derive from that. In the media distribution business, Apple dwarfs MSFT.
That was not only funny but insightful. Apple effectively crippled their patent trolling for future companies by invalidating most of them. I believe that it was cheaper to settle quickly, receive licenses for remaining existing patents and get an agreement for no future lawsuits on pending patents than to go after the remaining patents one by one.
New Macs, on the other hand, come with a restore DVD, which usually works only with the model of Mac the disc originally accompanied. You are not getting it. The full version of OS X comes with the latest iLife available when you purchase new hardware. They do not distinguish between upgrade and "full versions" because they only sell one version and it is expected that your "mac" will have come with a previous version of OS X that are are "upgrading" from regardless of whether it is installed or not. Apple does actually distribute a "free" upgrade only version through the up to date program but again that is only available for people who purchased a mac close to the release of the new release.
Why is so hard for you to understand? The boxed version does not check to see if OS X is already installed but it does check to see if it is a mac and all macs come with an earlier version of OS X.