Sony Fakes Blu-Ray Demo?

twasserman writes "Lance Ulanoff of PC Magazine reported on Sony's recent event showing the new VAIO AR desktop with a Blu-Ray drive, observing that Sony faked the high-def demo by using a plain old DVD+R of House of Flying Daggers. Even before the rootkit fiasco, Sony has seemed increasingly desperate, but the general consensus seems to be that Sony is looking pretty sad and pathetic." Update 03:07 GMT by SM: Many users are calling shenanigans on this one since there were two laptops side by side, one with the Blu-Ray demo and another for comparison. Independent confirmation or negation has yet to surface, so take with the requisite grain of salt required when reading any news.

It's probably NOT fake...

[grub]

It sounds like Lance Ulanoff from PC Magazine is jumping the gun. According to notebookreview.com [notebookreview.com]:

The premium model comes bundled with one of the first Blu-ray Disc (BD) movies, House of Flying Daggers, which Sony showed side-by-side tonight, along with the DVD version. Contrary to what some have said, the difference in quality is instantly noticeable

It sounds like Ulanoff was in too much of a rush for a scoop and didn't realize this when he ejected what was very likely the comparison DVD. Don't let the facts get in the way of a good Sony bashing, though.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The arrogance!

[uxnhoj123]

This is the problem with jumping to conclusions without any more evidence than a single photo of a burned disk, an empty case, and a computer being juxtaposed. Your IQ may or may not have been toyed with by the OP. After reading the article from notebookreview.com though, I'm somewhat inclined to believe that you've been had. So . . . is anyone gonna pay now?

Gotta love journalists

[billcopc]

Dumbass journalist alert!!!

Repeat after me: DVD is not HD.

Would Sony use a burnt DVD for display ? Possible (hey, there's idiot students everywhere), but unlikely. Would Sony use a regular DVD for comparison versus Blu-Ray ? Certainly!

It's not like they have to fake it, they have the drive. They probably have demo content too. I'm pretty sure Blu-Ray video is encoded at a much higher resolution than boring old 720x480 Mpeg-2 DVD. Now maybe if our overzealous reporter had taken a moment to actually examine the demo and see the difference, maybe even chat with the Sony media monkey, perhaps he would have come up with a more valid article. Or maybe he did all that, but decided the notoriety of his lies would be a bigger hit.

Re:Too many holes...

[Anonymous Coward]

At CES, I know for a fact that the demos for Blu-ray were run off of hard drives, not off of blu-ray media. it was all smoke and mirrors. my company created content for one of the blu-ray demos, and it never showed on a real blu-ray player.

But, I have to ask -- this is a surprise? this is something to be outraged at?

Has the author never attended a trade show like NAB or CES? It's pretty much standard operating procedure for these shows to show off stuff that isn't yet finished - half the high end digital cinema cameras that are shown at NAB are wooden models, for crying out loud!

If it's not shipping, it doesn't exist yet, as far as I'm concerned.

More than just a laser

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I work on Blu-Ray players(not for Sony), take that for what you will.

Aside from the article submitter trolling, I would like to state that Blu-Ray is more than just a laser. It's an entire format complete with a software virtual machine.

When we test content it comes on a DVD-R, we're testing layouts of files, VM access, decoding, video quality etc.

Now I don't know what was at the booth, but it is certainly possible that they were showing off their software Blu-Ray player with the content burned onto a DVD.

Re:It's probably NOT fake...

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, Slashdot posted a faked story without checking the facts? Nothing new, but there should definitely be a warning on this site, "do not trust what you read here, we don't check our facts". BTW, I didn't check my facts, but I'm not a popular website.

Re:Too many holes...

[Kuukai]

Umm, at the Sony building in Tokyo, I saw an impressive demo on a Blu-Ray player that you could buy in stores, so I doubt that was smoke and mirrors. I hope people realize the technology has been on the retail market for three years. I can easily believe that they'd be running stuff off of harddisk since it's simpler and the new firmware isn't finished, just saying that not everything's a lie...

Re:Too many holes...

[russellh]

I've been responsible for a demo or two in the past and there is nothing like having things fall apart at the last second. If what we saw is true, I wouldn't doubt that there were engineers scrambling to save the demo. There could be many reaons for that. who knows.

This topic is complete troll bait.

[Awptimus Prime]

Okay, I don't know why our poster thinks engaget is the "general concensus", perhaps he finds their comments section mentally stimulating (click the link in the headline and scroll down).

Regardless if this was faked or not, I don't trust all these band-wagoning fools here or there. All you have to do is read my previous posts that were modded as troll, flame, etc when I predicted a fiaso with Sony's Blu-ray and PS3 releases. People saw big numbers, wanted big numbers, and completely forgot about Sony's failures in the past.

Kind of reminds me of the idiocy supporting support for multiple wars a couple of years ago. People like to believe things and completely turn off the part of their brain that comprehends history's lessons.

Re:It's probably NOT fake...

[G-funk]

I agree the demo probably wasn't a complete phony like the original blog insists, but why a burned copy? Could it be they used a re-compressed (via dvdshrink etc) dvd to make the blu-ray content look better than it is?

-2 Flamebait the article

[Graboid]

Damn shame /. doesn't allow us to demerit its own postings when they are so bogus and designed to inflame and slander. These postings really undermine the credibility of /..

Re:It's probably NOT fake...

[Mr_Escher]

The reason I'd do it that way is so I could just cut, say, a 20 minute segment without the usual menus and so forth making it easier to sync the 2 machines side by side for comparison.

Re:It's probably NOT fake...

[idlemachine]

If you don't want bluray, just don't buy it. If you don't want a PS3, ditto.

Jesus wept. Every new tech launch. Every new console gen. Like clockwork. Same old bitching about price points, same old conspiracies about fraudulant demos, same old "this company isn't supporting the tech I want/like/own, so they're going to fail" rhetoric.

Doesn't anyone else getting really fucking tired of this, or am I missing the point, is this what we do now?

What are the facts here?

[kimvette]

I mean, really! Was the demo to show off the technology and the HiDef resolution, or was it to showcase the underlying media technology? If the former, and the story is indeed accurate, then shame on Sony. Ah hell, based on the rootkit, their membership in the RIAA and MPAA, attempted hijacking and elimination of Fair Use rights and right if first sale, it's clear that Sony has no shame.

If it is the latter and they were using a small amount of Blu-Ray-encoded/resolution files on DVD-R media with a custom build designed to recognize Blu-Ray content on a DVD due to what could be a scarcity of notebook form-factor Blu-Ray drives for the demo, then there isn't so much of a problem, except that if that were the case Sony should qualify the demo with "by the way, this is our software technology demo, using DVD-R media for this demo, blah blah blah" just to avoid the negative PR fiasco that you see here.

Re:Faking it isn't a problem

[laffer1]

Amazing, women fake and then complain when their partner sucks. I bet sony will be complaining about how unfair the demo was in a few weeks. :)

Here's the problem...

[JayBlalock]

Sony has ZERO credibility when it comes to demos. The fact that so many people accepted this story pretty much proves it. They fake demos left and right. (remember the "PS3" demo from LAST E3?) And when you're a tech company, and people won't even believe your PR any more, you've got MAJOR problems.

Re:It's probably NOT fake...

[From A Far Away Land]

DVD menus are a pain. You know they've got to be a pain when their makers bypass them just to make the discs useful.

Re:More than just a laser

[timeOday]

Now I don't know what was at the booth, but it is certainly possible that they were showing off their software Blu-Ray player with the content burned onto a DVD.

Which would definitely constitute a rigged demo. We've had the ability to play high-bitrate movies from hard-drives for years, so why does anybody care about Blu-Ray? Because it's a removable optical media with enough capacity for full-length high bitrate movies. So if that's not what they were demoing, it certainly was a rigged demo.

Re:More than just a laser

[mabinogi]

but the disc itself plays no part in the quality of the image (assuming of course that it meets the basic requirement that it's possible to pull the data off it fast enough)

In most cases, the only meaningful demo of BluRay is going to be quality based, and therefore the physical media is irrelevant, so I don't see how it's "Rigged" if it's still showing BluRay content.

Rabid anti-Sony brigade just jumped the shark

[SuperKendall]

Well that was the most obviously trumped-up story I've ever seen - what's next, Sony Tortures Kittens And Laughs Heartily?

I'd say the anti-Sony cabal have jumped the shark with this one.

Re:DIGG vs Slashdot

[Aranth Brainfire]

Every time someone posts something like this I go to Digg... and see dozens of examples completely inane/utterly worthless/disgustingly badly-reported shit I'd rather not slog through.

Seriously, this is like going to church to go tell everyone how awesome atheism is.

(also, your post kind of doesn't make any sense. you simultaneously expect slashdot to produce a story like this and expect it to be better? what?)

*burns karma*

Who cares?

[Runefox]

Even a DVD+R can hold HD data. It's not as though the media itself is inherently "high definition", it's the data held within that counts. The point is, however, that DVD+R cannot hold a feature-length film within its comparatively miniscule capacity of 4.7GB. The BluRay [wikipedia.org] disc, according to spec, can hold a standard of up to 33GB of data, which is plenty for feature-length HD content, and more than twice that of a standard single-layer HD-DVD [wikipedia.org] (15GB), which is also capable of holding feature-length video.

It's all about the capacity, folks. You guys should know that!

Re:More than just a laser

[timeOday]

It all depends on what you believe the main contribution and technical risk of Blu-Ray to be. As I said, I don't think it's the codec, we have those coming out of our ears. If somebody showed up at a trade show to demo yet another video codec playing back from a hard drive nobody would even notice. Rather, I think the main question is who can really manufacture a high-capacity optical disc players and media, and do it cheaply. Sony's problems in getting this done are reportedly contributing to the delays and high cost of the PS3, which is intended to be the biggest-selling Blu-Ray player of the next few years. Yet if Sony is demoing Blu-Ray without a Blu-Ray drive, that implies to me that they aren't because they can't. Even if that's not strictly true, it looks very bad for them not to be able to demo their own technology.

Does it really matter?

[91degrees]

The purpose of the demo is to show what the improvement will be like with Blu-Ray.

You can do that with a DVD! You only need a couple of minutes and can easily store that on a DVD. You use exactly the same codec as the Blu-Ray version, get the higher resolution, and allow people to compare. The Blu-Ray version will look better. Perhaps they are using a DVD for various reason. It's only a demonstration!

Why are all you so naive!? They do this sort of thing all the time. Advertising dog food - The dog doesn't like it. They use another brand. Showing a photo of the company founder? It may well be an stand-in. A celebrity endorsing a product? They may not even have tried the product. Advetising is like that. Why pick on Sony?

Guilty until proven innocent

[Opportunist]

Well, let's put it that way, should Sony sink, I'd offer them a glass of water or an anvil, but still, even they should be tried by the same standards I want to be tried on.

If someone claims a demo to be rigged, he should produce some evidence. Not the other way 'round.

Re:All of them are faked nowadays

[oc255]

What do you mean physically lagging? Do you mean regular computer or digital lag/skipping or was it like a reel-to-reel thing that was skipping?

Re:A blogger faked a fake...

[AndersOSU]

While I think it's fair to have a gut reaction against journalists, I don't think that it is ultimately a defensable position.

Technically minded people are the most arrogent people on the planet. They think that anything that doesn't capture reality in a wholly accurate manner in detail is useless. I mean clearly it should be a crime against humanity whenever someone equates copyright violation to theft.

In the real world people actually want to have current events explained to them in a way that they can understand. Journalists are trained in communication, not in your area of expertise. If the average person is incapable of understanding what a root-kit is, is it better to scoff at them and call them names, or to try to explain it (in technically inacurate terms) so that people with no desire to understand the inner-workings of an operating system can at least have an idea what it was that Sony did? So what if they call it a virus? Sure, it's not technically correct, but it gets the point across. That is after all what communication is all about.

I think that the problem stems from our education teching us that the printed word is an authority. I know I seldom questioned the accuracy of the encylopedia, my textbooks, or even the newspaper before I was in college (or at least until I was an upper-classman in high school.) Now in our particular areas of expertise we are frequently more knowlegable on a subject than the newspaper. We draw the conclusion that the newspaper is worthless as a source of information. What we (as technically minded people) fail to recognize is that the newspaper's goal isn't to be totally technically accurate, but rather to explain what is happening in the world to people who aren't experts.

Journalists have a role to play and it's not to provide technical information. If you are trying to understand AJAX by reading a Web 2.0 article in USA today, it isn't the journalist who has failed, you have failed in seeking out an appropriate source of information.