No Ceasefire in DVD Format Battle 359
haja writes "The BBC reports that the high definition DVD format war will continue until a winner is declared. There is no sign of the two camps working on a unified format. Some believe the industry at large is being damaged by the war due to consumer confusion. From the article: 'Backers of Blu-ray are bullish and are predicting victory. Blu-ray has more backing from film studios and more makers of the players, but HD-DVD has sold equally well in the first year of release. But the Blu-ray camp believes a library of exclusive titles and the power of PlayStation 3 - which has an in-built Blu-ray player - will see the format pull ahead in the next 12 months. Mike Dunn, president of worldwide home entertainment for 20th Century Fox, said: "I really believe the format war is in its final phase."'"
Re:It's quite easy, really. (Score:3, Informative)
More importantly, the PS3 could even win, and blu-ray could still lose. Since when has Sony ever been able to push a format? Heck, even with as popular as the PSP is, they still can't sell UMD media. Why would people pay twice as much for a medium when the existing one meets and exceeds most people's quality standards? (disclaimer: I like HD, but most people are not like me)
You need to seriously recalibrate your expectations when it comes to new, expensive media (especially media from Sony, which has categorically been able to screw up every format they've ever touched).
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:2, Informative)
Your not going to get any HD movies on your 300TB drives without them. And if i'm not mistaken, blu-rays didn't even allow you to copy the movies to your HD. That was the biggest reason why microsoft dropped support of blu-ray and shifted to HD-DVD. Because MS wanted people to be able to copy the movies to their HD, as its essential for their media center product lines.
I'm personally hoping that HD-DVD pulls ahead however. Its slightly less restrictive with DRM then sony's blu-ray (hence the reason ms are supporting it)
And lets not forget, the entire reason we have this stupid dvd format war, is because Sony pulled out of the HD-DVD consortium to make their own propriety disk format.
Re:How can they be that confident? (Score:4, Informative)
"Lots of people" ?? Gee, that sounds like hard, scientific, evidence. I'm not a Sony defender by any means (still playing my 4 year old PS2 just fine), but to insinuate that XB360/HD-DVD as king's of the hill is a little premature. PS3 has only been available in very limited fashion for about 2 months. XB360 has been out for how a while and still lags behind the old PS2 in sales. The high-end XB360 is $400. Tack on the cost of the HD-DVD and you are probably gonna spend over $600, same as you would for a PS3.
Neither HD-DVD or Blu-Ray really excite me much now, at least as a video medium. DVDs in progressive scan on a high-quality bigscreen TV look pretty damn good to my tired old eyes. HiDef discs might be nice, but not enough to justify the change, at least not for a couple of years.
Re:BLu-ray (Score:2, Informative)
"On November 14, 2006, Fox released their first 50 GB dual-layer Blu-ray Disc title, Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut. Other titles, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Fantastic Four and the recent remake of The Omen will be released on the same day and will be using AVC encoding and DTS HD Lossless Master Audio. The first shipments of the PlayStation 3 in the United States included a Blu-ray Disc version of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.[2]"
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu_ray#Released_tit
Re:It's quite easy, really. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, when have they done that? You must be thinking of all those standards they were a part of that flopped, like 3.5" floppy disks and compact discs.
Or perhaps you mean minidisc? Not very popular here, but they were definitely around, and in the UK quite pervasive for awhile. They did "win" vs a little thing called DAT, if you recall.
MemorySticks? All over the place. Particularly in high end cameras and phones.
Oh yes, speaking of high-end. Betacam SP for broadcast, maybe? DigiBeta? All total failures, right?
UMDs flopped for movies, but it doesn't matter, that was just a bonus anyways. Its the PSP game format, now just as proprietary as any Gameboy/DS cart.
As for Blu-Ray, well, in this case we aren't even talking about Sony. There's a few other companies on the Blu-Ray board that have a vested interest in it succeeding - but they are pipsqueaks like Disney, Apple and Sun.
Re:It's quite easy, really. (Score:3, Informative)
As long as you have a television that can accept and (if necessary) do a good job of scaling a 1080i or 1080p signal, the PS3 is the best, and cheapest, Blu-Ray player currently on the market.
The only things to be aware are that the PS3 doesn't have an IR port, so you'll need to plan on using the wireless game controller to control Blu-Ray playback, or you'll need to spend $30 to get Sony's Bluetooth remote control, which doesn't come with the system.
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, which they were rightly pilloried for. It's like a store that advertises itself as being open 24 hours... just not in a row.
The fact is hard drives don't last very long. Or at least, you can't count on them lasting very long - you may get lucky, but most don't make it past ten years, and that's being generous. Meanwhile, none of my DVD's has failed yet or even shown any signs of anything, and I have some of the earliest ever DVD releases, which are ten years old now.
Of course, HD-DVD and BD are totally different from DVD, and they may not prove to be as robust. But people said the same thing about DVD vs. CD and at least to this point, there seems to be no practical difference. Pressed (as opposed to burned) optical discs will probably always be more reliable than hard drives.
Re:I really don't care... (Score:3, Informative)
Naturally the solution is to use a projector. If they knock holes in the drywall, at least it's easily patched.
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:4, Informative)
Source for the last statement?
Seagate consumer drives [seagate.com] come with a mere 5 year warranty, and there's something that directly refutes your point.
Sony as an acronym (Score:3, Informative)
Selling Only Not Yet.
Sucks, Only Now Yours.
Stops On New Years(or 's)
Slow Ornery Nitwit, Yup.
True a lot of things took off (minidisk) in some markets, but were so constrained to geographic
regions it was almost a Pyrric (SP?) victory.
There's never really been a "Walkman" since the walkman that (coff) walked away from the competition.
Rootkits and exploding batteries aside, friends with Sony stuff are finding hidden gotchas with alarming
frequency. Home movies and burned disks that won't play and ask me if I know why.
My response so far is "It's a Sony, sorry".
Re:It's quite easy, really. (Score:1, Informative)
No I don't recall. What I remember is that the RIAA effectively killed the DAT industry. The RIAA demanded that the US legislature require "copy protection" on all DAT recorders since they would make a "perfect" copy of any audio source. And of course, the US legislature nodded their heads in agreement. Unfortunately, all copy protection schemes proposed ruined the audio quality. An example of one of the schemes was to notch out a certain frequency. If the recorder detected insufficient audio content at that frequency it would refuse to record.
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:3, Informative)
"Holds more data..." yes, per layer, however Current BRDs have 1 layer and just recently came out with dual-layer discs due to tremendous issues they had with the stability of the second layer, single layer discs are 25GB and dual layers are 50GB... there's speculation that they wont go beyond 2 layers due to the problems they experienced with getting to 2 layers, at least not in any reasonable amount of time.
HD-DVD has been dual-layer from it's release which is 30GB (15GB per layer), before it's release they had a working prototype of 3-layer HD-DVDs capable of 45GB, speculated to be released late 2007. Well at CES they announced that later this year they'll have 3-layer HD-DVDs with 17GB per layer capable of storing 51GB of data, and that they have a high confidence of adding more layers down the road.... so the data storage argument is essentially a wash.
Now lets look at other factors... since HD-DVD's configuration is very similar to that of DVDs most currently available machines used to press retail DVDs can be re-configured to also press HD-DVDs with a relatively low investment on the part of the manufacturer. BRDs on the other hand require all new machinery which could easily cost a single shop millions to setup. It might not be apparent now, but the down the road the average cost of HD-DVD will drop YEARS sooner then that of BRDs because it wont take them nearly as long to reach the point of return on investment. Not to mention the more apparent short term costs of the players with the BRD players costing on average double that of comparable HD-DVD players.
Finally I question how much the BRD backers really care about the quality of their releases when so many of the early released were encoded in the archaic Mpeg2 format as opposed to one of the newer and far superior codecs, particularly when you consider they only had single layer discs out at that point. Essentially they just pushed a number of crap quality releases out there for the sake of having releases out there. Some of them were just upscaled transfers from the DVD release and upon review were even found to look WORSE then their DVD brethren. Obviously they're no longer doing that at this point but you have to question their QC for letting something like that happen.
Personally I don't like either format for the equally restrictive DRM, and requiring me to use an HDCP protected connection (which my home theater equipment doesn't support). Honestly I see the BRD vs. HD-DVD going in one of two direction... either:
A. It will end up the same way as SACD vs. DVD-A vs. MP3... no one cares about a higher quality disc and would rather have downloadable content that's more versatile.
B. It will end up the same way as DVD+R vs DVD-R... Dual format players come out and the difference between the two formats will simply become invisible to the consumer.
Well I think of it as "truth in advertising" (Score:3, Informative)
When people buy a DVD they aren't buying a movie--they are putting down $20 or whatever to buy a cheap, over-packaged plastic disc worth a few cents plus a license granting them permission to private, non-commercial exhibition. The only true reason for physical distribution media under such a business model, in the media industry, is that it is the best, most established practical technology right now for distribution. The technological requirement for physical media has unfortunately given the impression to consumers that they "own a movie" (or even a "copy of a movie") when no regular individual has EVER really "owned" a movie (or music, or whatever)--the best you can hope for is a "perpetual rental agreement".
I think that electronic distribution not only has the potential to make things much more convenient for the consumer, it is also a more true representation of what you are REALLY getting when you purchase media content--the essential product is not (and never has been) a physical thing but rather the right to enjoy (loot at, listen to, etc) multimedia content. The fact that there is no discrete physical item involved in distribution is merely further optimisation (from film to magnetic tape to optical disc to on-line electronic).
and for the foreseeable future, people will continue to prefer to purchase things which have some physical component, rather than one that is entirely computer based.
I think most people would LOVE to free up all that shelf space in ther display cases for other, more attractive keepsakes (I know very few examples of videos being "shown off", unless it is, say, the star wars geek who has a rare original Betamax release of the "Star Wars" trilogy still in shrink-wrap or something like that). People, aside from those rare exceptions like the aforementioned one, actually buy DVDs to *watch the movie*. Furthermore, people buy non-tangible things all the time, especially in the form of services and utilities: I buy electricity to light my house, I buy internet connectivity, I purchase securities with my online broker and so on, and in none of those cases am I expecting some fixed, physical object in return (though as the case with media, there is generally some transitory physical manifestation associated with the use of these non-tangible items). Consumers aren't so unsophisticated that they cannot at least recognise that not everything you have to pay for is tangible in nature.
It looks to me like the lifespan of physical media formats is undergoing geometric decay: 8mm and 16mm Film were the chief consumer distribution formats (mostly in schools but in a few homes too) for, lets say, four decades (1940s to 1970s). Videotape (U-Matic, then Beta and VHS) became widespread in the 1970s and started giving way to DVD in the 1990s--four decades. Standard-definition digital optical media (DVDs) arrived en-force in the late 1990s and are poised to fade in the late 2000s--one decade. It stands to reason that high-definition digital optical media (BD and HD-DVD) could have a five-year lifespan. Beyond that the whole idea of physical media could be obsolete.
Yes, I know my time frames are perhaps too approximate (small-gauge film existed many years before the 1940s, videotape existed earlier and is still sold today, and so on) but I'm talking about the era of a technology's rise and prominence in the consumer market. Movies will be sold on little plastic discs for a long time to come, but I can't see it being the contemporary distribution method in the 2020s.
My chief concern is that as technology advances distribution becomes more efficient and less costly, however the big, old media distributors are still big and old and inefficient, and are fighting tooth and nail to maintain and even inflate the prices they make consumers pay for their content, using a combination of legislation (DMCA) and what I call "false innovation"