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."'"
Release them in numbers, (Score:2, Insightful)
Consumer "confusion"? (Score:4, Insightful)
There, corrected that for you.
Re:It's quite easy, really. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:4, Insightful)
what format war? (Score:5, Insightful)
One argument I hear is that more will adopt when the formats get cheaper, but even if players were $50 like cheap standard DVD's you still have to replace your library to take advantage of it. Maybe im in the minority but the difference isnt great enough to justify replacing a collection of around 700 movies.
With the consistently plumetting costs of storage I'm leaning towards the idea that both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray both flop as movie standards in favor of video on demand and other downloadable content.
Re:BLu-ray (Score:3, Insightful)
They still have not solved the dual layer problem. So all Blu-Ray discs right now are single layer and LESS capacity than HD-DVD.
Until the solve the Dual layer manufacturing problems (hope to by the end of Q1) it's an inferior format to HD-DVD.
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:3, Insightful)
Seagate announces Hard Drives will be at 300TB in a few years, what do we even need these formats for? DRM? yaaaaay!
Doesn't matter how big the hard drive is. How is that movie going to get from the publisher, to you, at full resolution, without a removable disk? As has been happening for decades, hard disk capacity is growing faster than communications bandwidth. So great, you can fit a bunch of movies on your hard drive. It'll still take you a day to download the movie. If only there were a way to get the information to you faster? Perhaps something small, and made of plastic...
Name recognition (Score:4, Insightful)
Right now, if the average Joe walks into an electronics store looking for high definition movie players he/she will see a wall of "Blu-Ray" and "HD-DVD". Most people will see the "HD" and think "yeah, that is what I want, Blu-Ray, what is that? No.. No.. I want high-definition".
Based on name alone HD has an advantage. Blu-Ray needs some serious marketing because if they rely on the sales person in the electronic store for supplying information they will be hosed!
The war is almost over...?? (Score:5, Insightful)
The insurgency in Iraq is "in the last throes," Vice President Dick Cheney says. (June 20, 2005)
Some people clearly can't see the forest through the trees.
Dual-format players (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's quite easy, really. (Score:2, Insightful)
If BluRay succeeds, it will be seen by Sony as a success of this miserable business plan. At that point we can all expect Sony to tread even further down this dead end road. Should BluRay fail however, then maybe, just maybe, Sony will finally realize that their biggest enemy is themselves. Obviously, the failure of BluRay wouldn't necessarily mean that things will get better. If if should succeed though, we can almost be assured that they will get worse.
In about six months (Score:3, Insightful)
There's your winner!
I really don't care... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not because I'm a Luddite, but for two very critical reasons:
1) It's too damned expensive and I don't have the money to blow on HD toys. Maybe the rest of the world makes over 100K a year and lives in an inexpensive area, but I don't. I have bills to pay, damnit, why the hell would I waste my money on an HD setup?
2) I have kids. Autisitc kids with a penchant for running up to the T.V. and giving the screen an open-palm slap just because they like the sound. How long do you think a $3000.00 LCD or Plasma is going to last under that kind of punishment? And if I can't expect the T.V. to last, why the heck would I shell out for the player if I can't view all that "HD goodness" on my old 480P NTSC tube T.V.?
The problem is that the hardware and media guys, in all thier excitement to re-energize the home entertainment market by forcing upgrades, have forgotten that a large percentage of the population either a) just doesn't give a damn, or b) are like me, and can't get an HD setup even if they want to. So really, WHO GIVES A SHIT about HD other than the videophiles with more money than brains? Let THEM buy into all the HD hype, and the rest of us will just wait until the dust settles and we can guy a 27" HD T.V. for the same price that we can buy a 27" regular T.V. today.
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, if you _do_ need them on all the time, look for something like the Western Digital Caviar special edition drives, which have a 3 year warranty, or SCSI drives, whose warranties go up to 5 years. Standard consumer drives come with a mere 1 year warranty, and there's a good reason why...
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus you also have other people doing the same, like Sonic Solutions and Apple. Downloadable content will end the HD format war or at least give them a hard slap to the face so that they will move to ending it.
Re:Until a winner is declared (Score:3, Insightful)
There needn't be a winner in a format war. Remember MiniDisc v Digital Cassette? The winner then was MP3. Remember SACD v DVD-Audio? The winner in that war was, well, nobody really as neither format sells in large quantities.
Personally, I expect the winner is going to be likely to be EVD or FVD, the alternative Asian standards. If HDDVD and Blu-Ray keep faffing around like this, they're going to swamped by a tide of next-generation Asian electronics that will be cheap, flexible and Just Work. Which neither HDDVD or Blu-Ray do, reliably.
Yeah, this is profoundly dumb. (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason DVD was huge was not because it was so inherently great as a format. (in fact, it has a number of glaring flaws) It's because it was a huge leap forward over VHS in practically every area. Better picture, better sound, more compact on the shelf, longer run times between disc\tape changes, easy chapter seek, and all those glorious extras for people to play with. There were so many benefits that it was worth it to people to upgrade their libraries.
But what does HD/BR offer? Better picture, to roughly 10% or 15% of the public. And better sound to an even smaller percentage than that. And that's about it.
Why in the hell would people pay to re-buy their libraries AGAIN? Especially as it was just in the last couple years that the DVD collection became "complete"? There's just no reason at all. And that's leaving out how, in the grand scheme, increasingly few movies really benefit from high-def. There was little real improvement in your average romantic comedy from VHS to DVD. The shift from DVD to HD produces even less of use. Do you really want to get distracted counting the pores on Meg Ryan's nose?
Both formats were doomed, from the very outset, to be a specialty niche product, pretty much like Laserdisc. It amazes me that both camps were (apparently) totally blind to this and sunk millions and millions into them anyway. The BEST outcome would have been if the PS3 or 360 became big and people picked up a handful of compatable discs to play in it. (big name titles, like King Kong or such) They're not going to re-buy the library. Ever. Not until a new format offers as much of an improvement over DVD as DVD offered over VHS.
About the only way the studios might be able to force a format shift would be if they decided to just drop support for basic DVD and swallow the profit losses that would incur. (since it would destroy home video sales for a couple years) But even that might not do the trick. At that point, piracy would start looking like the viable alternative to all but the most steadfast consumer.
The studios have really painted themselves into a corner, and I'm curious how they're going to get out of it.
Sigh. (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be nice if it came down to which format was more technically excellent. Yeah, I know, it doesn't work like that. It's sad.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:BLu-ray (Score:3, Insightful)
Single layer capacity for a Blu-Ray Disc...IE, all currently produced Blu-Ray discs, movies, and PS3 games...is 25GB.
HD-DVD is only 15. Sure, Dual is 30, but they're not being produced very much either...and that is the absolute max for HD-DVD anyways.
More than 25GB is not needed at the moment for Blu-Ray, they know this so haven't done anything stupid to try to rush 50GB dual layer discs through manufacturing...there is basically zero demand at the moment. It does indeed work though and will be in mass production when needed.
FURTHER, Blu-Ray as I'm quite certain you well know is spec'd to handle up to 100GB. In the end, there will be over 3x as much space for data on Blu-Ray as there will be on HD-DVD.
Argue all you want about which is better or which will win...but from a technical standpoint alone, Blu-Ray wins, hands down. It's just silly to try to argue otherwise because it's just not true. Of course that means just about nothing in terms of which will win out as was proven definitively with VHS vs BETA. Less useful but cheaper will likely win out in the long run.
Too much too soon. (Score:2, Insightful)
The only way they will get people to stop buying regular DVD's now is to stop making them, and I can see great things happening then. Consumers having become enlightened with the ways of Centralized Media Storage and Network Media Clients, coupled with faster and fatser internet and larger storage capabilities will just move directly to 100% illegal downloading. This will of course cause the colapse of hollywood and see all major movie stars pan-handling in the streets of downtown LA.
If I had to pick a format, I would make it HDDVD. Remember Sony's history with proprietary audio and video formats? Betamax, Minidisc, Hi-MD, ATRAC3, UMD. You can almost taste the failure.
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:3, Insightful)
oh no! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:2, Insightful)
Before going nuts with fancy server-priced hard drives, why not try cooling the things? Check the SMART data for the disk and see what the operating temperature is; try and keep it 35 degC or lower (parameter 194). (I don't have any citations for that; I just have drives that keep working, year after year, running around 30-35 degC.)
Nothing kills a disk faster than overheating. And it doesn't matter what the warranty is; all a warranty gets you is a replacement. You still have to deal with replacing the dead disk and waiting for the mirror or parity rebuild.
(Let's put the "inexpensive" back in "redundant array of inexpensive disks".)
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:3, Insightful)
Maxtor low profile drives in the Hewlett-Packard machines were decidedly unreliable - about 15% failed in less than a year in the network of 80 machines (and these are only 40GB drives). We replaced them with WD and Seagate drives - we've not had a single failure since then. Part of the problem is the design of the cooling in the ultraslim HP machines isn't very good - the drive bay gets very little cooling.
The trouble is it's a crap shoot. You don't know which drives made when are going to be reliable or unreliable until they've been in the field long enough to find out. It's not just hard drives, either. We also got hit by the capacitor plague. Machines started failing at a very high rate (we went from no failed machines in month 7 to a 50% failure rate in month 8) with some HP workstations. That batch of workstations got completely replaced under warranty - when we inspected the remaining machines we found every single one had bulging and burst capacitors. That particular batch of machines was heading for 100% failure rate. But other batches of HP machines we have just keep going on year after year without a single problem.
You can't even pin a specific manufacturer. Other Maxtor disks that we have as a group have had an extremely low failure rate - so chances are, if we now abandon Maxtor and, say, exclusively use WD, at some point we'll get a bad batch of disks from WD. With these very large disks, if you have the data to fill them, you're rolling the dice unless you have a way of doing a very good backup.
Re:Sigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I used to feel the same way, that tech never seemed to win because it was better tech but because of externalities. Then I started to realise that those externalities are as much a part of the tech as what I as an engineer geek would call the tech. Is the format that plays only 1/10th of the movies really a better format even if it has higher resolution, better scratch resistance, or whatever else? In a very real and practical sense I'd say no. Just like a "better" Internet with newer routing protocols and every other wiz-bang thing you could improve about the internet wouldn't actually be any "better" if it never connected to more than 100 hosts.
I feel the same way about software licenses. People say "use whichever is best for the job!" but forget how significant an effect the software license can have on how the software does the job. I learned this the hard way when a very good hspice simulator wasn't up to the task because we didn't have enough licenses to run the simulations we needed in the time frame we needed them.
It depresses us geeks that our great work can be ruined by an accountant, marketer, or lawyer, but that's just the way it is. The product isn't done until the accountant, marketer, and lawyer get their hands on it -- because without them, it would never be a thing that is sold. I've learned to just accept this as part of engineering.
A view into the future (Score:2, Insightful)
But inside the box there is a code that you either type directly into Google or in your device connected to your TV. That will download and install the movie on your harddisk. But if you want to see the movie on the train, you simply download it to the USB-stick and watch it on your 14" pocket-size screen. Who would carry around a huge disk?
For Splatter, Blood and Gore XV, they are planing to sell the Official Splatter, Blood and Gore XV drink in bars and you will get your favorite gore scene played on the glass while drinking it. Like 99% of the music bands today, selling disks is just not something the movie-company gets any big money from.
WHO cares! WHO CARES? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a "technodork!" with a fairly decent amount of disposable income and frankly, I couldn't give a hoot about these 2 formats.
We all got burnt on DVD's for the PC, yes they might be cheap now but the fact of the matter is the DVD format had +R / -R AND RAM!
It's a disaster, sure it's fixed now and yes prices are finally good but they took longer than they should have, (Dual layer blanks are still overpriced - quite likely due to that screwup)
We might have had low cost DVD players, burners and blanks faster than we got them - and while it's good now I'm sure some of us have been either burnt, confused or stuck due to that format war, let alone this one where the stakes seem much higher, last round it was only the writable discs which were a mess, at least the ROMs themselves seemed to follow a consistent standard!
Standards are meant to be there to make things easier for EVERYONE! The consumer, the supplier, etc - if HD-DVD and Blu-Ray can't get their shit together, I'll be damned if I'm joining a camp only to possibly be burnt, plus ultimately it's a damned waste of resources.
Here's 2 small pieces of information which may or may not be correct which are even FURTHER dilating things and screwing @#%t up for us. (note: I'm not 100% on these but I have heard them 'around' on the web)
Blu-Ray are having problems getting the second damn layer working properly.
HD-DVD is looking at getting 17gb on the discs per layer and moving to 3 layer (51gb)
Now these two, if true are just mind bogglingly retarded! Not only do we have enough trouble with the fact there's not one single standard, they now may be changing / modifying their own standards to fix or add those features,.. can you say WTF?
I can rant all day, I've done it before on these formats - I'm a bitter little man and ranting is my thing but let me get to something productive for a change.
DON'T BUY THIS SHIT - don't buy a dual format drive, don't buy a dual format disc, don't buy a single format drive or disc!
DON'T DO IT.
FUCK them! - DVD was a perfectly good picture for ALL of us only 18 months ago, on a damn nice TV with a nice player and good cabling, there's nothing wrong with it and there's substantially less copy protection screwing us.
I for one am going to sit back and wait - until they can offer me a cheap, simple solution which isn't going to burn my wallet,..... and frankly considering how much of a ballsup it is so far, I have serious suspicions that we're not going to see a single, cheap simple solution for many years to come.
I dread to imagine trying to purchase blanks of these in 12 months "Yeah I need a HD-DVD 1.0 spec 15gb per layer but dual layer blank please" - what the heck!"
Save yourselves the hassle and the cost and let this stuff fizzle out and heck while you're at it - stop submitting stories about it too, it's just frustrating to read about, let them both wave their dopey flags at each other all day long while I'm sitting at home enjoying regular DVD's, high def is simply not ready yet.