HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disappointing So Far

Dster76 writes "Reuters is reporting that the new format wars are showing signs of underwhelming performance, both technically and financially. In fact, according to the article, the new formats are just not selling. Reuters chalks it up to a current lack of interest. They indicate that as more movies and players become available this autumn, sales should improve. Just the same, the current picture is quite sour." From the article: "'Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience,' said Bjorn Dybdahl, president of San Antonio, Texas-based specialty store Bjorn's. 'High expectations were set. At every meeting with Sony, every demonstration was spectacular,' Dybdahl said. 'Then along comes the first Blu-ray player from Samsung and that's when my expectations were hurt. When we put the disc in, all the sales people looked around and said it doesn't look much better than a standard DVD,' he said."

Disappointing

[neonprimetime]

It was disappointed in the article format. Here's the Printer Friendly version [reuters.com]

No selling points

[mugnyte]

There's no guarantee that you're decoding to full res, that your player WILL EVER be able to decode to full res, that full res is even WORTH watching, and that you ever really OWN the content you bought.

  Why would anyone buy this stuff? There's few positive selling points about it. Movies are on DVD for as long as anyone can foresee, and computers can record on these formats and play on setops. What are the market-accepted details for the new formats? Nobody can decide.

  Peh, I'd love to see the capacities go up, but DRM fouled both these formats. Nobody's going to wipe the stink off them, and so we must let them die. Perhaps a company will simply go for capacity and format without mucking around with anything else.

Good greif. All 3 player support the same codecs

[acomj]

This is nonsense. Both Blu-ray and HDVDVD support the same codecs Mpeg2, mpeg 4 (h.264) and VC1 (Windows Media). For some reason Blu-ray creation software didn't support the other codecs initially, but the player does.

To summarize...

[dch24]

• Due to the Image Constraint Token (ICT) your new HD player will not play your movies at full resolution. (Because the HDTVs sold to date mostly have component inputs, and no HDMI input)
• There are only a few titles in each format, and no guarantee that all titles will become available in one format (until the format war is over)
• The AACS DRM offers features like remotely blacklisting your player, which will immediately brick it when you play that new movie. Why would I buy this? No, I'm not a pirate; this feature is not a feature at all.
• Demos at the store have been disappointing at best. The improvement over DVD is pretty slim.
• I'd rather wait for the price to drop on 1080p players. I know that a 60Hz 1080i can play a 24fps 1080p movie. But what if I want to watch a 60fps 1080p movie? See point above about your computer being better than your DVD player for this.
• This article [slashdot.org] points out that your computer will probably out-perform any DVD player you can buy
• BD-R and HD-DVD-R are available but still pretty expensive. This might not seem like a factor at first, but remember that the big pirating outfits are not using recordable media. The early adopters will. Case in point: I work with an independent movie studio and they want to show their previews in HD when they travel. What they do right now is bring a nice powerful laptop with the movie on the hard disk. How is a player going to compete with that?

Re:Hybrids may be the only real winner

[WillAffleckUW]

If the PS3 fails to ignite blu-ray sales, Sony is going to have to back down and start licensing the blu-ray technology to manufacturers of hybrids

They've already been forced to license it in China, due to widescale piracy of the tech. At least, according to Fortune [fortune.com] and the Wall Street Journal [wsj.com]. Showed up in an interview with the Scottish CEO of Sony and then followup articles in the WSJ.

not priced for target

[gsn]

I don't think these guys realize that a large number of people who buy dvds are in college or recent graduates with student loans. I can't afford a 1000 buck player and a 1500 buck minimum HDTV and then the actual discs (the electronics would be more than a months stipend right there). The prices will eventually come down and this format war will resolve itself. Even then I will think hard about paying so much for to watch TV and movies and I will probably resist and dismiss it as too much of a luxury. I spent that much after saving for around a year and a half to get a very nice gaming rig but a PC does a lot more than a HDTV and HD player. Even if I did buy the HD equipment I'm certainly not replacing my dvds - they are good enough, and if DVDs remain significantly cheaper than HD content I will probably buy the DVDs instead.

This is going to be a long slow battle...

[Name Anonymous]

First there was:

• VHS versus Betamax took a noticeable amount of time before one format won out.
• With 12" video discs there were 3 competing formats. The Pioneer 12" Laserdisc won that and fairly quickly. DVDs killed the 12" Laserdisc.
• CDs pretty much killed all but killed off vinyl record, but it took time.
• DVDs killed VHS.

Now we have the battle of the HD formats. This will probably be in length of time much like the VHS versus Betamax battle. And add to that the fact that not everyone will be jumping right out to buy a new TV. I keep looking at how nice the plasma screens are, but I can't justify the price yet. When my current TV dies I will end up with a plasma scrren. However with all the changes, including the HDMI connector, I'm glad I haven't bought one yet.

However, one thing that I know is that a bunch of people have stopped buying as many DVDs as they used to. Why buy a DVD now and then want to replace it next year with a high def version? of course if enough people do that, movie sales will drop even more and then the MPAA will start screaming piracy since their sales fell off. Maybe everybody should boycott buying movies until their is only one new format?

They just don't get it - Need HDMI to see in HD

[markdj]

There are two reasons for this: DVD quality and HDMI. The first has been expounded on at length. The picture quality is not that much greater than regular DVD. But no one seems to be talking about the HDMI problem. You need an HD TV to take advantage of the higher resolution, but few people have them and those that do have only one or no HDMI input. Because the studios are worried about copying they won't allow HD signals to be output over composite video. Only HDMI has the encryption to keep copying from happening. Many early HDTV adopters have no HDMI port and are not going to spend $thousands to buy another TV for marginal picture improvement. Those that do have an HDMI port have only one and that is being used by the cable or satellite box. HDMI switch boxes cost $300+ and have no remote! That's my situation. Only in 2006 have HDTVs with 2 HDMI ports become widely available and those are only the more expensive ones. So these new HD/Blu Ray DVDs are for new TV buyers and those TVs are still too expensive to kickstart the market.

Re:HD-DVD is the winner

[maynard]

A single layer blu-ray disc has ~25GB of capacity, of which almost 15% is used for uncompressed audio. This avsforum thread on the Samsung BDP-1000 [avsforum.com] is particularly illuminating on the issue of space constraints due to the mix of single layer discs with mpeg2 as the codec. --M

Popular Mechanics

[_Shorty-dammit]

Page 32 of the August 2006 issue of Popular Mechanics has a small story about comparing HD-DVD to standard DVD. Their three test subjects said that the picture from the standard (upconverting) DVD player was almost as good as the real HD-DVD player, but cost $420 less. If the picture's almost as good, why would they want to buy the HD-DVD player? Then I read it again and noticed that the test used a 42" plasma screen that was only 720p. Why even bother doing a comparison if you're not going to use a 1080i/p screen? You're just stacking the deck in favour of putting HD-DVD in a poor light. Standard DVD gets you 345,600 pixels. 720p gets you 921,600 pixels, 2 and 2/3 more pixels. A big step up, to be sure. Perhaps at a regular viewing distance it might not look *that* much better, and maybe that's what happened for the test subjects. But at 1080 you get 2,073,600 pixels! A full SIX times as many pixels as standard def. DVD gives you, and still 2.25 times as many pixels as 720p!! Why, oh why on earth would you do a test with a 720p rig?!? It won't tell you anywhere near the whole story. If you want to see how good HD-DVD is capable of being you need to be looking at the entire picture, not one that has been cutback in resolution by more than half. Seeing stuff like this, especially in something like Popular Mechanics, just aggravates me. It is going to make HD-DVD/Blu-ray that much harder to gain acceptance and start driving prices down. And that's bad for everyone.

Re:The war is over.

[Churla]

You're making a couple big assumtions here champ...

First that the PS3 will be a sell out huge success. Whereas it will sell a lot of units, many people are predicting that it will not be that great, and in fact could cause Sony to really scuttle itself.

Second, you're treating all those PS3's like they're being used as Blu-ray players, when in fact all they will really be capitalizing on is the storage capacity. Most of those PS3's are NOT going to be hooked up to anything doing HD video of any kind. They will be on TV's in gameroom, and in kids rooms. This is not adoption of a new video standard, it's adoption of a high capacity storage disc for games. And since you will never buy the same disc to play on a Xbox as a PS3 having the same media format for both is a moot point. If people don't realize they're buying a blu-ray drive and only think they're upgrading their kids gaming setup it's not a win.

The PS2 did great thing for DVD adoption but that was because there wasn't really any competition, and DVD was a significant upgrade from VHS. There's competition here.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

> LaserDisc?

That's pretty funny! But just to be pedantic, laserdiscs aren't digital. Popular misconception because they are optical like CDs and DVDs, but it's true, they're analog!

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[bnenning]

Funny, I bet you have plenty of DVDs, despite their DRM and region encoding.

Which are trivially defeatable. I don't buy a lot of DVDs, but I would buy exactly zero if I couldn't rip them. Likewise, if Blu-ray or HD-DVD gets cracked as fully as DVD, I'll consider them.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[IWannaBeAnAC]

We know that they scan film using a 4000dpi process but how good does that look in 1080p?

Easy. The film is 35mm wide = 1.38 inches, so the horizontal resolution of the scanned image is then just over 5,500 pixels. I would say that should look just fine in 1080p. Or even higher resolution. Definitely no need for new equipment! Filming something in IMAX format and then transferring it, even to HD-DVD would be total overkill.

Re:What a shocker

[GutBomb]

he;s not talking about the United States. in europe the vast majority of natively widescreen TVs are SDTV which contrary to your post is NOT synonymous with "NTSC/PAL". NTSC/PAL are SDTV but so is 480p (720x480) or 576i(720x576) which in europe are regularly transmitted in anamorphic 16:9. Anamorphic 16:9 is very common in europe, while it;s pretty much unheard of in north america, where we tend to letterbox our 16:9 content into a 4:3 frame.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[nattt]

Well, had a 720p and 1080p Plasma in the office, comparing some 4k video downscaled to 1080p, playback from uncompressed DPX over HDSDI. Simple fact was, you had to stand pretty close to the monitors to see the extra resolution of the 1080p, and overall, the 720p had better contrast and an overall better picture. There's no point in more resolution unless you do it right.

With regards to Blu Ray - saw an instore demo, and it looked so awful, I'd prefer to watch a normal DVD. There were more compression artifacts than I've had hot dinners, and really looked bit-starved. What a crappy demo for a crappy format. Yuck.

Providers differ on quality

[PRMan]

Exactly.

• DirecTV: All 1080i broadcasts are resampled from 1920x1080 to 1280x1080. Apparently they use some slight color reduction and blur filters for further bandwidth savings.
• Dish: Some of their 1080i channels are resampled to 1280x1080, but most are still at 1920.
• Comcast: Does not recompress in most markets. Corporate goal is to not recompress at all.
• Time Warner: Does not recompress in most markets. No stated corporate goal.
• Other providers tend to differ more per market.