I don't believe that the Xbox360 HD DVD add-on will read standard DVDs (I could be wrong, but I think I read that somewhere). So if that's true, the people have to be putting the HD DVD version into the player, so your theory probably isn't right.
Not that I have any idea as to what the problem really is...
Whatever, the only thing I'll bother correcting you on is this: "Wrong. They do contain region codes. They are just not setting them. This is the same for all the AACS quality-degradation stuff. No one dares turn those bits on, because at this point if things fuck up, then the delicate market might collapse."
HD-DVD does NOT have region coding, while Blu-Ray DOES have region coding (right here and now). Go buy a BD disk from overseas and see if it plays in your player.
"Uhh, sure. I guess? But BD's have one thing going for them that HD-DVDs don't. Awesome capacity. And what this tends to translate into is very very good sound. BD-50 disks tend to have uncompressed 5.1 audio, and it makes a difference in a home theater system."
It's already been proven that you don't need 50G for a full-length movie. Watch King-Kong on HD-DVD and tell me that it could look/sound any better.
The whole "uncompressed audio" is just a way of saying, "We're wasting space." What you want is lossless audio, which many HD-DVD disks do have. Just because it's compressed, doesn't mean it loses quality and I would assume that/. people would understand that. When you gzip a file, you're not losing any of the data, but it takes a hell of a lot less space. BD is simply *wasting* their space with inefficiencies.
HD-DVD is far better for consumers for many reasons:
1) Less copy protection - Blu-Ray is BD+ waiting in the wings
2) More interactivity - Blu-Ray is STILL waiting for BD-J; watch Tokyo Drift for some cool examples of iHD on HD-DVD)
3) NO REGION CODING - You can buy a movie from anywhere in the world and play it on your player wihout having to hack it first. In addition, many "blu-ray exclusive" titles in the US are available overseas and in Canada for HD-DVD
I'm not saying BD won't win the war, I'm just saying that it *shouldn't* win the war as the alternative has bigger benefits for customers.
"This is true. But you make it sound like Sony is "getting away with" MPEG-2 encoding. MPEG-2 is a very old standard, but is very capable of producing excellent quality HD output if you give it enough kb/sec." The early BD releases that used MPEG-2 looked like crap, no matter the bitrate. Did you see Fifth Element on BD? By all accounts, the Superbit version looked better.
...and look the same (or worse) compared to HD-DVD.
HD looks awesome on the screen, not the format.
As for the original question about why it costs more for the HD version -- the manufacturing isn't what's costing the money, it's the encoding process. Studios have to encode it differently for HD (VC-1, MPEG-4) compared to DVD (MPEG-2) -- unless you're Sony in the beginning, thinking that they can get away with encoding in MPEG-2 on BD.
10k is what they initially quoted us way back when and it was for the patch only. We tried fighting with them, but they said they couldn't negotiate. I think they lowered the price about 3-4 months ago (probably because nobody was paying the $10k), but I don't know what it went down to because we didn't want it at that point.
It was definitely per server though, and only for the patch. I'll see if I can dig up the email when I get to work on Monday for the humor value:)
Not sure how this worked, but when I worked part time for the University of Minnesota (as a student), as long as we worked less than 20 hours in a week, we were exempt from paying social security of medicare tax. I'm not sure if the University picked up 100% of it, or if the school had a deal with the government, but it made getting a campus job instead of an off campus job a no-brainer.
Bandai, a major Anime studio, announced it was HD-DVD exclusive at last month's CES, so that should make the decision even easier, as long as things stick that way.
That's one of the key reasons to support HD-DVD -- it doesn't have region coding, whereas Blu-Ray does. To make things better, lots of the titles that are Blu-Ray exclusive in the States are being released on HD-DVD out of the States. For example, Sin City will be released on HD-DVD in Canada. Terminator 2 is released on HD-DVD in England already I believe. Underworld: Evolution is also released overseas, as is Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire. There's plenty of other examples. Sure, you'll pay $5-$10 more for the movie, but it'll take buying a LOT of movies to make up for a $600 BD player IMHO. Plus, you won't have to worry about the extra BD+ encryption that Sony could bring out at any time.
In addition, as others have said, the article is crap. HD-DVD is "0.09 points" higher than BD in the video category, and that's called "almost the same, but BD being 0.15 points higher in audio means that it's much better? Huh??? Even if you take the potential reviewer biases out, I'd say those values are pretty much the same.
"All this DRM does is allow movie companies to continue their questionable practice of price discrimination using artificial region locks and allows the media conglomerates to govern how and when you watch the content, extending copyright artificially."
That'd be well and good, but HD-DVD has no region locking... You can buy an HD-DVD from anywhere (and lots of people do - mainly because there's a lot of titles that are Blu-Ray exclusive in the States that are being released on HD-DVD in Europe, such as Rambo, Saw, etc. not to mention the fact that you can get Harry Potter Goblet of Fire on HD-DVD in the UK, but not in the states (yet).
"Your company does not have to give you two weeks notice to fire you, nor would they."
Your company has to give you notice that you're not doing a good job (unless you're in the "probation period," generally 6 months). After that, if you screw up, they write you up. If they just came up to you out of the blue and said, "You're fired!" you'd be able to challenge that.
The key is if you're fired, you can't get unemployment, but if you're laid off, you can. The company can lay you off without warning, but then you get unemloyment. If they don't want to pay for your unemployment, they need documented proof as to why they fired you.
My wife's a manager (in the state of Minnesota - the state is at-will employment) and has had to fire a couple of (non-IT) people, so she's gone through this before.
But why bother downloading the HD-DVD version only to downrez it and view on a 15" monitor? At that point, you're better off just downloading (or, *gasp*, buying) the DVD version.
I never said it was a feature of the format, but the HD-DVD players all do an awesome job at upconverting, so it's another reason that you don't have to upgrade your curretn DVDs if you don't want to.
I have an HD-DVD player and I love it, but why does everyone assume you have to replace your whole library with the new format? The HD-DVD player upconverts regular DVDs to look MUCH better than a regular DVD player, so all of the old disks work fine. Buy your new movies as HD-DVDs (with an occasional upgrade if you want -- for example, I rebought Serenity in HD) and you're fine.
If you're talking about burned disks, then maybe not. But the pressed ones? Yeah, no problem. Do you have any CDs that are over 20 years old? They play fine and DVD is extremely similar. There's been some isolated mentions of "DVD rot" but I'm not buying into that. I have disks that are ~8 years old and they work fine; I have no reason to believe that they won't last another 12.
Tapes are actually worse, IMHO -- get a magnet too close to a tape and you can demagnetize it. Just don't scratch your DVD and it'll be fine.
I see people bashing the title selections, but there are a lot of very good movies available that havn't been made in the last ten years (none on Blu-Ray yet, only HD-DVD). I'm not sure everyone actually knows about these.
I believe that the problems have always been there, they're just being reported on more. Areas of crime shift - an area that was safe 30 years ago may not be safe today, but that's mean every location is unsafe.
When I was growing up in the late 70s/early 80s, I rememeber playing in my neighborhood and a couple guys drove up and asked if I wanted some jelly beans. I ran home as fast as I could and they drove away, but what would've happened if I had taken them up on that offer? And more importantly, would it have made national news? No.
"They can, in theory, offer better sound, but only if you have a system capable of the new formats (and I've yet to see a compatible receiver) and only if the disc has it and many don't since Dolby Digital and DTS are the formats that are actually used in theatres."
This is not true. I can't speak for Blu-Ray (because I don't have one), but I do have an HD-DVD player and love it. All HD-DVDs have Dolby Digital+ which is better than regular DD. In addition, many HD-DVDs have "TrueHD" audio which is significantly better than DD.
Since the decoding is done in the player (not the receiver), all you need is HDMI 1.1 port to get the audio (it's sent via a PCM stream to the receiver, where extra processing is done for speaker distances, etc). In addition, if you don't have HDMI you can do the same thing with the analog outputs on the player - connect them to the analog inputs on your receiver and the same thing happens. The low end 2nd gen HD-DVD player will not have analog outputs, so if you want the cheap HD-DVD player with analog out, you need to buy it now.
The audio improvements are very good, but probably only if you have a decent setup (ie: "Hoome theater in a box" probably won't notice much of a difference).
I don't think HD-DVD/Blu-Ray will go the way of DVD-A/SACD like a lot of people predict. The sales of this new format completely dwarf what the audio format was selling (well, maybe not Blu-Ray...) http://www.thedvdwars.com/index.cfm
The way I look at it, I can get a player for $350 that makes my current DVDs look better than a normal DVD player and lets me buy new HD-DVDs. I don't need to replace my extensive collection with HD-DVDs unless I want to, and Netflix offers most/all HD-DVDs so I can rent 'em instead of buying if I want. Seems like a no brainer to me, but YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
"HD/BD gives us a better picture and possible connection headaches if HDCP takes hold. That's it, "
Not to pick nits, but it gives superior audio as well. Everyone focuses on the video quality, but the AQ is leaps and bounds better too.
I don't believe that the Xbox360 HD DVD add-on will read standard DVDs (I could be wrong, but I think I read that somewhere). So if that's true, the people have to be putting the HD DVD version into the player, so your theory probably isn't right. Not that I have any idea as to what the problem really is...
Actually, all HD DVD players are required to be updatable over the Internet. It's in the spec, so they all have an ethernet port.
Yes, there's talk about creating a region code for HD-DVD, but currenlty NO HD-DVD has a region code on it. None. (yes, Amazon has incorrectly pulled data from their regular DVDs and listed them as region codes for some HD-DVD, but that info is incorrect -- if you look at the HD-DVD version of Tokyo Drift, it says that the region code is unknown: http://www.amazon.com/Fast-Furious-HD-DVD/dp/B000G W8OAA/ref=sr_1_1/102-7175168-2871323?ie=UTF8&s=dvd &qid=1173973889&sr=1-1 )
Whatever, the only thing I'll bother correcting you on is this:
"Wrong. They do contain region codes. They are just not setting them. This is the same for all the AACS quality-degradation stuff. No one dares turn those bits on, because at this point if things fuck up, then the delicate market might collapse."
HD-DVD does NOT have region coding, while Blu-Ray DOES have region coding (right here and now). Go buy a BD disk from overseas and see if it plays in your player.
"Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense"
Well, at least your signature line is right.
It's already been proven that you don't need 50G for a full-length movie. Watch King-Kong on HD-DVD and tell me that it could look/sound any better.
The whole "uncompressed audio" is just a way of saying, "We're wasting space." What you want is lossless audio, which many HD-DVD disks do have. Just because it's compressed, doesn't mean it loses quality and I would assume that
HD-DVD is far better for consumers for many reasons:
1) Less copy protection - Blu-Ray is BD+ waiting in the wings
2) More interactivity - Blu-Ray is STILL waiting for BD-J; watch Tokyo Drift for some cool examples of iHD on HD-DVD)
3) NO REGION CODING - You can buy a movie from anywhere in the world and play it on your player wihout having to hack it first. In addition, many "blu-ray exclusive" titles in the US are available overseas and in Canada for HD-DVD
I'm not saying BD won't win the war, I'm just saying that it *shouldn't* win the war as the alternative has bigger benefits for customers.
"This is true. But you make it sound like Sony is "getting away with" MPEG-2 encoding. MPEG-2 is a very old standard, but is very capable of producing excellent quality HD output if you give it enough kb/sec."
The early BD releases that used MPEG-2 looked like crap, no matter the bitrate. Did you see Fifth Element on BD? By all accounts, the Superbit version looked better.
...and look the same (or worse) compared to HD-DVD.
HD looks awesome on the screen, not the format.
As for the original question about why it costs more for the HD version -- the manufacturing isn't what's costing the money, it's the encoding process. Studios have to encode it differently for HD (VC-1, MPEG-4) compared to DVD (MPEG-2) -- unless you're Sony in the beginning, thinking that they can get away with encoding in MPEG-2 on BD.
There's two sides on the disk - one is DVD, one is HD-DVD (think back to the "widescreen" vs "fullscreen" disks from the early DVD days).
It was definitely per server though, and only for the patch. I'll see if I can dig up the email when I get to work on Monday for the humor value :)
If you want them to update Solaris 7 or earlier, it'll cost you $10,000/server with a cap of $150,000. Highway robbery if you ask me.
We're just modifying the timezone files with zic.
As much as I dislike MS, they're not alone in the highway robbery department here.
Not sure how this worked, but when I worked part time for the University of Minnesota (as a student), as long as we worked less than 20 hours in a week, we were exempt from paying social security of medicare tax. I'm not sure if the University picked up 100% of it, or if the school had a deal with the government, but it made getting a campus job instead of an off campus job a no-brainer.
Bandai, a major Anime studio, announced it was HD-DVD exclusive at last month's CES, so that should make the decision even easier, as long as things stick that way.
That's one of the key reasons to support HD-DVD -- it doesn't have region coding, whereas Blu-Ray does. To make things better, lots of the titles that are Blu-Ray exclusive in the States are being released on HD-DVD out of the States. For example, Sin City will be released on HD-DVD in Canada. Terminator 2 is released on HD-DVD in England already I believe. Underworld: Evolution is also released overseas, as is Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire. There's plenty of other examples. Sure, you'll pay $5-$10 more for the movie, but it'll take buying a LOT of movies to make up for a $600 BD player IMHO. Plus, you won't have to worry about the extra BD+ encryption that Sony could bring out at any time.
In addition, as others have said, the article is crap. HD-DVD is "0.09 points" higher than BD in the video category, and that's called "almost the same, but BD being 0.15 points higher in audio means that it's much better? Huh??? Even if you take the potential reviewer biases out, I'd say those values are pretty much the same.
Anything older than Solaris 8 is not supported unless you want to pay $10,000/server (max of $150,000). Yup, you read that right.
"All this DRM does is allow movie companies to continue their questionable practice of price discrimination using artificial region locks and allows the media conglomerates to govern how and when you watch the content, extending copyright artificially."
That'd be well and good, but HD-DVD has no region locking... You can buy an HD-DVD from anywhere (and lots of people do - mainly because there's a lot of titles that are Blu-Ray exclusive in the States that are being released on HD-DVD in Europe, such as Rambo, Saw, etc. not to mention the fact that you can get Harry Potter Goblet of Fire on HD-DVD in the UK, but not in the states (yet).
"Your company does not have to give you two weeks notice to fire you, nor would they."
Your company has to give you notice that you're not doing a good job (unless you're in the "probation period," generally 6 months). After that, if you screw up, they write you up. If they just came up to you out of the blue and said, "You're fired!" you'd be able to challenge that.
The key is if you're fired, you can't get unemployment, but if you're laid off, you can. The company can lay you off without warning, but then you get unemloyment. If they don't want to pay for your unemployment, they need documented proof as to why they fired you.
My wife's a manager (in the state of Minnesota - the state is at-will employment) and has had to fire a couple of (non-IT) people, so she's gone through this before.
Woah, I just saw a big spider walk by, read your post, make some marks in a notebook, and then walk away! Freaky!
But why bother downloading the HD-DVD version only to downrez it and view on a 15" monitor? At that point, you're better off just downloading (or, *gasp*, buying) the DVD version.
I never said it was a feature of the format, but the HD-DVD players all do an awesome job at upconverting, so it's another reason that you don't have to upgrade your curretn DVDs if you don't want to.
I have an HD-DVD player and I love it, but why does everyone assume you have to replace your whole library with the new format? The HD-DVD player upconverts regular DVDs to look MUCH better than a regular DVD player, so all of the old disks work fine. Buy your new movies as HD-DVDs (with an occasional upgrade if you want -- for example, I rebought Serenity in HD) and you're fine.
No need to rebuy your whole collection again.
If you're talking about burned disks, then maybe not. But the pressed ones? Yeah, no problem. Do you have any CDs that are over 20 years old? They play fine and DVD is extremely similar. There's been some isolated mentions of "DVD rot" but I'm not buying into that. I have disks that are ~8 years old and they work fine; I have no reason to believe that they won't last another 12.
Tapes are actually worse, IMHO -- get a magnet too close to a tape and you can demagnetize it. Just don't scratch your DVD and it'll be fine.
I put this reply in a different thread, but I think it belongs here as well. There ARE good films out there. Here's a few:
0 HEVZ8K/sr=11-1/qid=1166798118/ref=sr_11_1/102-7175 168-2871323
R R7Q/sr=11-1/qid=1166798133/ref=sr_11_1/102-7175168 -2871323
D /dp/B000I0RR76/sr=1-1/qid=1166798143/ref=pd_bbs_sr _1/102-7175168-2871323?ie=UTF8&s=dvd
r y-HD-DVD/dp/B000IXZ7M0/sr=11-1/qid=1166798273/ref= sr_11_1/102-7175168-2871323
Searchers (Wayne):
http://www.amazon.com/The-Searchers-HD-DVD/dp/B00
Casablanca:
http://www.amazon.com/Casablanca-HD-DVD/dp/B000I0
Robin Hood (classic):
http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Robin-Hood-HD-DV
And to a lesser extent, the original Willy Wonka:
http://www.amazon.com/Willy-Wonka-Chocolate-Facto
I see people bashing the title selections, but there are a lot of very good movies available that havn't been made in the last ten years (none on Blu-Ray yet, only HD-DVD). I'm not sure everyone actually knows about these.
0 HEVZ8K/sr=11-1/qid=1166798118/ref=sr_11_1/102-7175 168-2871323
R R7Q/sr=11-1/qid=1166798133/ref=sr_11_1/102-7175168 -2871323
D /dp/B000I0RR76/sr=1-1/qid=1166798143/ref=pd_bbs_sr _1/102-7175168-2871323?ie=UTF8&s=dvd
r y-HD-DVD/dp/B000IXZ7M0/sr=11-1/qid=1166798273/ref= sr_11_1/102-7175168-2871323
Searchers (Wayne):
http://www.amazon.com/The-Searchers-HD-DVD/dp/B00
Casablanca:
http://www.amazon.com/Casablanca-HD-DVD/dp/B000I0
Robin Hood (classic):
http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Robin-Hood-HD-DV
And to a lesser extent, the original Willy Wonka:
http://www.amazon.com/Willy-Wonka-Chocolate-Facto
So let's not jump to conclusions that the only movies available on the new formats suck. There are plenty of great movies available for HD-DVD.
I believe that the problems have always been there, they're just being reported on more. Areas of crime shift - an area that was safe 30 years ago may not be safe today, but that's mean every location is unsafe.
When I was growing up in the late 70s/early 80s, I rememeber playing in my neighborhood and a couple guys drove up and asked if I wanted some jelly beans. I ran home as fast as I could and they drove away, but what would've happened if I had taken them up on that offer? And more importantly, would it have made national news? No.
"They can, in theory, offer better sound, but only if you have a system capable of the new formats (and I've yet to see a compatible receiver) and only if the disc has it and many don't since Dolby Digital and DTS are the formats that are actually used in theatres."
This is not true. I can't speak for Blu-Ray (because I don't have one), but I do have an HD-DVD player and love it. All HD-DVDs have Dolby Digital+ which is better than regular DD. In addition, many HD-DVDs have "TrueHD" audio which is significantly better than DD.
Since the decoding is done in the player (not the receiver), all you need is HDMI 1.1 port to get the audio (it's sent via a PCM stream to the receiver, where extra processing is done for speaker distances, etc). In addition, if you don't have HDMI you can do the same thing with the analog outputs on the player - connect them to the analog inputs on your receiver and the same thing happens. The low end 2nd gen HD-DVD player will not have analog outputs, so if you want the cheap HD-DVD player with analog out, you need to buy it now.
The audio improvements are very good, but probably only if you have a decent setup (ie: "Hoome theater in a box" probably won't notice much of a difference).
I don't think HD-DVD/Blu-Ray will go the way of DVD-A/SACD like a lot of people predict. The sales of this new format completely dwarf what the audio format was selling (well, maybe not Blu-Ray...) http://www.thedvdwars.com/index.cfm
The way I look at it, I can get a player for $350 that makes my current DVDs look better than a normal DVD player and lets me buy new HD-DVDs. I don't need to replace my extensive collection with HD-DVDs unless I want to, and Netflix offers most/all HD-DVDs so I can rent 'em instead of buying if I want. Seems like a no brainer to me, but YMMV.