Blu-Ray/HD-DVD Talks End 389
Last minute talks to unify the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats have failed. Matsushita, owner of the Panasonic brand, has stated 'the market will decide the winner.' From the article: "The two sides held talks last year in the hopes of avoiding a prolonged format battle similar to the one between Betamax and VHS videotapes in the 1980s, knowing that it could discourage consumers from shifting to the advanced discs and stifle the industry's growth. But the talks soon fizzled out, with each side reluctant to establish a format based on the other's disc structure. At stake is the $24 billion home video market and a slice of the personal computer market as PCs will be equipped with Blu-ray or HD DVD optical drives."
Just fine (Score:4, Insightful)
the 'market' (Score:3, Insightful)
It's just unfortunate that the market powers are the producers rather than the consumers. History repeating itself again. And again.
And the winner is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, my HDTV is always in HD anyway, why would I need HD or ray's blue DVD's? That's just stupid!*
*This comment is a joke, but it is widely believed to be true in the consumer world.
It's all a waste of time. (Score:1, Insightful)
Perhaps not immediately, but within a few years a system will exist which will allow the streaming of any movie ever made via broadband instantly. Why would you want to bother keeping an anachronistic collection of shiny discs, when you could have anything you want, instantly.
These format wars will all look quaint in a few years when the bandwidth for home delivery of such a system is widely available.
Hybrid Drives (Score:1, Insightful)
Should have picked a better name then. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blu-Ray? What's that?
Re:It's all a waste of time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And the winner is... (Score:5, Insightful)
-Rick
Re:Winner! Pah (Score:2, Insightful)
What the crap did that have to do with the topic at hand?
Re:blu-ray all the way! (Score:5, Insightful)
HD-DVD [wikipedia.org] Blu Ray [wikipedia.org]
As you can see the difference is quite a bit.
Re:It's all a waste of time. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have been hearing this for the past... what... 10 years now? The cold, hard truth is that there are ENORMOUS markets (asia, russia, many countries in south america and africa) which WILL NOT have the bandwidth required for this for many years to come. As long as this is the case, hard media will continue to exist and drive big business. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies have a datarate of 8-9 MB/s (which is rather impressive, considering they are packing about 6 times the amount of video data due to the increased resolution, into the same bitrate DVD video is in). Forget about Asia, how many people in the US actually have lines that fast?
Re:Just fine (Score:5, Insightful)
All you are going to learn is that players are going to cost $LICENSING_FEE more than they would have, and the players will play both.
Market Decides = Consumers Screwed (Score:2, Insightful)
What can I say that hasn't been said a million times before. This is yet another example of how closed door meetings determine the course of our society and how the rich and powerful control the interests of the entire earth.
This is something that rests uneasy in me, because I don't want to adopt a standard that fades. I don't want one of my favorite movies to be ONLY HD DVD and not Blu-Ray.
And the worst part is,
Here we go with another round of re-mastering and reselling. Just like the record industry and archiving their vinyl library to CD, or the previous migration from VHS to DVD, here is ANOTHER round of $20-$50 gotta haves to line the pockets of the man.
And the future will hold?
They will blame US again, when the reissues stop selling, they will blame internet traffic for the lack of sales, the industry is stabbing the same medium they MUST adopt to if they are to survive!
So what can YOU do?
Force them to make a decision, instead of making all of us gamble on their indecisiveness! Don't be an early adopting sucker, even if pride and envy tug at your wallethand.
This is like going to war based on manufactured intelligence & opinion poll results.
Re:blu-ray all the way! (Score:2, Insightful)
How can the
Re:It's all a waste of time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently you've never used a portable DVD player.
Nor have you ever had kids who watch the same movie a LOT of times (and I'd rather not pay for each view).
should read... (Score:2, Insightful)
should read:
Last minute talks to unify the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats have failed. Matsushita, owner of the Panasonic brand, has stated 'the consumer will have to pay for our greed and inability to compromise'.
Re:Wish they'd started sooner... (Score:2, Insightful)
I bought BetaMax becuase it was the superior technology not relaizing I should have been paying attention to who had the best marketing.
Only when there is one format left will I even begin to consider purchasing a HD-DVD.
In their pissing contest they are only hurting themselves by delaying acceptance and thereby sales.
Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's all a waste of time. (Score:2, Insightful)
The way you'd watch a downloaded/on-demand movie is not that much different from the way you'd watch a DVD - you don't interact with the disc at all, except to put it in the player. In fact, no disc is better since you don't have to change discs to watch different movies.
The main problem with on-demand is that it will be quite awhile until it can offer as big a library as DVDs can... You can get really obscure stuff on DVD now, but could an on-demand service offer that? Downloads could, but getting the stuff from your PC to the TV is a pain for the average person, plus download speeds aren't quite there yet.
Home movies will likely eventually be mostly downloaded/streamed, with a smaller "on disc" market, but it's a ways off... I used to think like you "it'll never happen", but I thought that way about music too, and now I can't even imagine buying a physical CD, unless it's from a band at their concert (because if it's a local or small band they probably aren't on itunes).
The LAST WORD (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just fine (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sure the programmers developing the reference implementations of the two standards would love to hear that.
The standard includes both the physical media and the software. Nothing specified is irrelevant. You are a boob.
Re:Third way (Score:3, Insightful)
IF either format has any hope of "winning" the first year, though, I think it's HD-DVD. Considering that the flagship players of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have MSRPs of US$500 and $1,000 respectively, it's going to be an uphill battle getting anyone but die-hard PS3 fans to buy BR...
Re:the 'market' (Score:5, Insightful)
Ditto ditto quadraphonic records, ditto.
Ditto ditto DAT vs DCC, ditto.
I strongly suspect that HD-DVD and Blu-ray will be another ditto.
Re:It's all a waste of time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's all a waste of time. (Score:2, Insightful)
The point is, my grandparents have books still around that my dad read as a boy. Most likely, the publisher of that book is long gone, or a lot different than it was 50 years ago. What if they'd "subscribed" to that book - yes, it could have been available instantly to them at any point, but for how long? If you subscribe to content, how do you know you'll still have that content if someone else controls it? That's the whole problem here. The only person I trust with my possessions is me.
Ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, right now the high def dvds are looking a lot like lazerdisk, in the sense that it will be too expensive for anyone to buy it, and by the time it becomes cheap there will be a better standard out. There's just too much competition in the storage space for this dumbass strategy to work. Just because DVD was a success doesn't mean that the successor to DVD will be.
My bet is that what we will end up doing for hi def movies, is using the existing DVD media, but changing the format from mpeg-2, to something that compresses better like mpeg-4 or windows media. Extra processing power to do decompression may get a lot cheaper a lot faster than these lazers are.
You have to consider that at this point, PVRs already have the power to do streaming video decompression, and compression of video. It's not hard to imagine increasing the processing power there and adding additional functionality like a divx dvd player, and some basic video games (roms anyone?). You could probably do something equivalent with a modded first gen xbox.
DVDs were essentially high tech VCRs, which made sense at the time, but these days if people are going to spend more than $50 on some piece of electronics, they expect it to do a lot more than just play videos on their tv.
I can see them becoming a little bit more successful on the PCs and on consoles. PCs need a way to back up more and more massive data, and consoles need lots of space for more content. That's the primary reason that I'm pretty optimistic about the PS3. Video games are becoming enourmous in terms of space. These disks are on the order of 50 GB, which not that long ago was the size of an entire harddrive. Can game makers fill up all that space with artwork and video? Probably not yet, but I suspect we will start to see some extremely high resolution textures on the 2nd generation PS3 games. Maybe there's just not that much need to expand in that direction... but I suspect that game makers will find some interesting way to make use of the extra space. The main problem I see is lack of exclusive titles these days, game makers need to make their games generic so they can port them from system to system. Thus, the limitations of the xbox 360 will probably keep game makers from taking too much advantage of special things the PS3 can do that can't be ported.
Serve them Right... (Score:3, Insightful)
It would serve them right to both lose. Then we might get some format everyone agreed on from the beginning.
Re:And the winner is... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Rational people will wait until one or the other wins.
2) Current DVDs, with proper upscaling, will be close enough to the quality of the native-HD movies that there will be little-to-no incentive to spend extra on HD.
3) People already own the TV, the player, and plenty of other DVD's. And they're generally happy with what they have. Buying new movies in good ol' regular DVD is a 'safe' choice.
This is a case where both sides were saying "If I can't have it my way, then we won't do it at all". Both groups would prefer that everyone suffer equally (until the market sorts things out) than to have one group profit more than the other.
Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
That's okay, both sides know they can just blame any of their failures on piracy.
Re:should read... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exactly HD-DVD's problem (Score:1, Insightful)
Please note that this is only temporary . After the first few months of movies, they will start putting the resolution limit on newer discs.
This is only a lawsuit-preventative measure; they're not doing it to be nice or to be charitable, or because they actually care about anyone but themselves, they're doing it to prevent themselves from getting sued by everyone who bought a non-HDMI TV.
Yes, add-on being key word (Score:3, Insightful)
How many other console add-ons like this have been successful? It will add only marginally to the HD-DVD install base, unless some really popular games require it (I still think the next version of Halo may do so in a last move by Microsoft to drive adoption of the format).
I'ts no surprise Microsoft is not adding on a Blu-Ray player since Microsoft is one of the main players in the HD-DVD consortium. However in the end it is what consumers buy in standalone players, not PC's that will determine the winner of the format war. Even in the PC land where you'd think Microsoft would dominate more people will be included to get Blu-Ray burners since they hold more data (which is why Apple is backing Blu-Ray). If Vista had been out sooner (which will support HD-DVD from the start but probably not Blu-Ray) it could have helped drive Blu-Ray from that end (whcih I'm sure was intented) but they couldn't even get that done in time to help.
Meanwhile the PS3 should be out before Christmas releasing millions of players into the market, and on the PC side Apple should have Powermacs (desktops) out in Q3-Q4, at the high end probably including Blu-Ray burners as well. And since they dual boot now...
Re:And the winner is... (Score:2, Insightful)
(a) A 1.5TB Raid and virtual drives makes any storage gains irrelevant,
(b) Even on a 56" 1080i native DLP set, from 10' away I'm hard pressed to tell a clean 16:9 anamorphic recording at 480i from a 720p or 1080i picture (and I just got an A minus on my last vision checkup 2 weeks ago),
(c) Damned if I'm going to help fund or expand the market penetration of a trojan horse for "Trusted Computing" or expanded DRM. Sorry, CE market, but the accompanying step towards SuperAdmin powers that nameless bureaucrats would consequently be gaining over my hardware is a no go.
My take... say "no thanks" to both and encourage those who look to you for Electronic Wisdom and Wizardry to do the same; the more of these things that get stuck on the shelves, the better for all of us.
Your sure? (Score:4, Insightful)
To me.
Just because you don't find it worth the money doesn't mean that everyone else agrees with you.
I seen some bittorrent releases in HD formats and the difference is huge. Granted the largest actually have to be scaled down to fit on my screen but you can't deny the difference. It is the difference between an actors face being a blur with darkspots for eyes and mouth and being able to see wether they had a good nights sleep the day before.
Does it matter?
If it didn't we would still be using 8mm film. Black & White.
Everytime a new format comes along you get the same old argument about it being to costly for a minor increase. Yet that never stopped anyone before.
We will see one of these being the winner in a few years time. The early players will be sold out in no time and take up will be a lot faster then you think and then when the next-gen format war starts you will be spouting the same nonsense.
TV is a lot more important to people then you think. A 1000 dollars to have the next best thing is nothing to a lot of people.
Either that or just HD-DVD (Score:2, Insightful)
HD-DVD only drives will be significantly easier to produce, using the same wavelengths as today. HD-DVD drives therefore can probably go lower in price.
So you'll end up with a market of HD-DVD only players, and players that will blay both HD-DVD and BD-ROM.
So studios logically pick HD-DVD because everyone can play it. Just ask OS/2 how supporting the competing standard as well as your own works when your competition does not return the favor..
Controlling what you've purchased (Score:2, Insightful)
Parent makes a good point. In addition to availability, what about the content of the media itself, even if it is still available?
If we move completely over to a download on demand format, what's to keep studios from changing the content on a whim? People are already complaining about that, what with the 'remastered' versions of Star Wars (IV-VI) being the only ones available on DVD. What if they were originally released only through live streaming?
Re:Just fine (Score:3, Insightful)
Too true (Score:3, Insightful)
On any non-HD set, of course, there's no beneift at all.
It's nothing like the VHS-DVD jump. The benefits on ANY set are immense. The picture is better on all but the lowest quality sets and doesn't degrade over time. The sound as leaps and bounds over VHS, as good as the theatres if you've the hardware. There are all kinds of special features on most discs. Best of all: no rewinding, no fast forwarding, just seek to wherever you like.
So I understand why everyone made the DVD leap, and even that took a while. I am skeptical people will make the HD leap. HD sets are still rare and, really, HD isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's better, no question, but not earth shattering.
And of course one has to wonder how many will be shitty upsamples, not full remasters. I have HBO HD and they show movies all the time in HD... Or rather I should say it's an HD signal to the DVR. The actual source is not HD. It's DVD rez that's been upsampled. It looks just about identicle to the results from my DVD player. I wonder how many "HD-DVDs" will actually end up being poor upsamples jobs that really don't give much mroe effective rez than DVD.
Re:Your sure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Everytime a new format comes along you get the same old argument about it being to costly for a minor increase. Yet that never stopped anyone before.
How many DVD-audio disks do you own?
Re:Should have picked a better name then. (Score:4, Insightful)
You my friend, are a clueless consumer (sarcasm, bear with me).
Today, the average consumer knows all of the TV jargon and terminology. To test your skills and those of a random friend, you must know all of the following:
LDTV 240p30, 288p25 (CIF)
SDTV 480i60 (NTSC), 480p30, 576i50 (PAL, SÉCAM), 576p25
EDTV 480p60, 576p50, 720i50, 720i60, 720p24, 720p25, 720p30
HDTV 720p50, 720p60, 1080i50, 1080i60, 1080p24, 1080p25, 1080p30
DVI, HDMI, coax, optical, RCA, component, composite, Svideo, VGA, XVGA, WXVGA, SVGA, BNC
DD, DTS, SDDS, Dolby Pro Logic, mono, 2.0, 2.1, 5.0, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1
4x3 vs 16x9 (You MUST know this better than your equipment, because they will fuck it up).
Oxygen free copper, binding posts, spades, banana plugs
Not to mention the newcomers on the block like:
Macrovision, DRM, DCMA, FBI, and bubba who will love you despite your crimes for watching TV.
Forgive me, I may have missed one or two or hundreds of other letters or terms.
Apple needs to get into the TV market. Remember when your options for a TV were what kind of wood finish you wanted, when you wanted it delivered, and did you want to spend extra for color?
Re:Your sure? (Score:3, Insightful)
Interlace is bad, bad, bad.
Re:It's all a waste of time. (Score:3, Insightful)