FWIW, this is one of the many reasons I have gone to a meta-crawler. I don't even trust the page ratings from any of the big players. I use Dogpile and find I get a slightly more effective search.
The reason for the urgency of getting these formats out the door is the reality that they are exactly like DVDs, an intermediate technology with a relatively short life expectancy. As such, it is far better to evaluate the real impact on the market in comparison to alternatives that are available or on the horizon.
The question is one of cost. Let us assume the player to be a fixed cost you are willing to bear. This is, after all for an early adopter needing to lead the market. On-going cost of the media itself from what have been able to analyze of approximate file size vs. stated sale price is about $1.25 to $1.40 per gigabyte. (~25GB at a cost of $30+) This price is justified for a product that offers 50% greater resolution (480p vs 720p, note the player will not handle 1080p!)and no HD sound. Compare this to the cost of a hard drive at ~$.35 per gigabyte. I have faith in the market to bring me a better product to my HTPC via bit torrent or some other emerging net technology.
This would have been a pitifull attempt by media companies to keep us in a hard copy, easily controllable, DRM locked environment had not Sony taken that one extra step of greedy they have shown in the past and needed to control the format exclusively. What has resulted, as others have said, is a stalemate. The difference is, it simply won't matter since the whole issue will be bypassed by better, more customer friendly technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Try this: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/ Not available on Linux "yet", but it was only announced last week.
FWIW, this is one of the many reasons I have gone to a meta-crawler. I don't even trust the page ratings from any of the big players. I use Dogpile and find I get a slightly more effective search.
The reason for the urgency of getting these formats out the door is the reality that they are exactly like DVDs, an intermediate technology with a relatively short life expectancy. As such, it is far better to evaluate the real impact on the market in comparison to alternatives that are available or on the horizon. The question is one of cost. Let us assume the player to be a fixed cost you are willing to bear. This is, after all for an early adopter needing to lead the market. On-going cost of the media itself from what have been able to analyze of approximate file size vs. stated sale price is about $1.25 to $1.40 per gigabyte. (~25GB at a cost of $30+) This price is justified for a product that offers 50% greater resolution (480p vs 720p, note the player will not handle 1080p!)and no HD sound. Compare this to the cost of a hard drive at ~$.35 per gigabyte. I have faith in the market to bring me a better product to my HTPC via bit torrent or some other emerging net technology. This would have been a pitifull attempt by media companies to keep us in a hard copy, easily controllable, DRM locked environment had not Sony taken that one extra step of greedy they have shown in the past and needed to control the format exclusively. What has resulted, as others have said, is a stalemate. The difference is, it simply won't matter since the whole issue will be bypassed by better, more customer friendly technology.