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."'"
They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:3, Interesting)
Seagate announces Hard Drives will be at 300TB in a few years, what do we even need these formats for? DRM? yaaaaay!
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:4, Interesting)
As of now hard drives life sucks horribly. At least my DVD's don't crash and take all the data with them like my last 3 Fujitsu, last 2 Western Digital, and last 4 Seagate drives.
Every drive I have owned above 120gig capacity has not lasted more than 18 moths. this is with cooling fans to keep the insane temperatures down and REALLY GOOD power going to them.
Hard drive longivity simply sucks right now to the point that I dont trust them to hold data safely for more than 3 months.
How can they be that confident? (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Lots of people already have an Xbox 360, so the cost of the HD-DVD addon really doesn't seem so bad, compared to the $600 or $1000+ Blu-Ray players.
2. I can't think of many Blu-ray movies that I just can't live without. There are loads of HD-DVD movies I would love to own.
3. The Xbox 360 is a more capable media center device. Since the HD-DVD box is part of the 360, that creates a nice little package.
4. The name. "What the hell is a 'blue...ray'?" When you say HD-DVD they at the very least have a good idea that it's some type of movie disc.
I just can't see how Blu-ray hopes to make significant inroads into the HD movie market. Maybe this won't even matter. Maybe we'll all have fiber to the curb in 3 years and will stream HD content from Netflix or something.
A war worth ignoring (Score:5, Interesting)
An HD TV set, with a PVR, and digital cable is serving me just fine. On Demand movies in HD 5.1 gets it done for me.
The only counter argument that nags in the back of my mind is that I borrowed the LOST first and second season DVDs from a friend, and truly enjoyed watching the series on DVD. No Commercials, and three episodes a night really move the plot along. I find it very difficult to stay interested in the show now that I am watching it on a weekly basis, when they happen to bless us with an episode. Too long between important events, and the hook is gone... So the DVDs of Complete seasons may be a better way to enjoy quality TV shows.
But, I suspect that it won't be long before the LOST series shows up on the On Demand service, just like the fine HBO content... and I can again enjoy three episodes in a sitting.
Re:Until a winner is declared (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's quite easy, really. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm still waiting a while to get a good HDTV, much less a HD player (waiting to see how things play out a little more).
What about Divx? (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead I bought a Sony player which upconverts the signal first. It also conditions the signal so that virtually no pixelization can be seen on the TV. The picture on a 46" 720P set is astounding. Really, it looks close to an HD signal and I'm starting to think there isn't very much added value in the hi-def discs.
I hope the format war continues (Score:5, Interesting)
So I'm thrilled that the studios and hardware people are having a rough time of this. I doubt that they'll ever say, "DRM is preventing an resolution to the format wars", but at this point I pretty much just want DRM pushers to suffer.
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:3, Interesting)
you mean like I already mentioned in my original post? I have really REALLY good power and cooling on them. and they STILL fail simply because hard drives with capacities above 120Gig are unstable.
Been there done that, consumer quality drives are really low grade.
Also as others have mentioned... if I scratch a single DVD, I have a chance at recovering it and then I only lose 1 movie. If my Western digital does the typical "ka-thunk, ka-thunk" on startup EVERYTHING IS LOST because of an engineering flaw with their drives that has been there for almost 10 years now.
Yes I can get SCSI U320 drives that will last, but nothing in the IDE arena is designed for any longevity. The manufacturers themselves tell us this with the incredibly short warranties.
Re:It's quite easy, really. (Score:3, Interesting)
By that logic the N64 should have trounced the PS, and thus the NGC should have crounced the PS2, Xbox, and DC.
This time the price and the avaliablity are making people sit back, wait, and evaluate. The reason the PS2 is horribly popular is a few things, however the driving force once all the systems were up and running was the presence of exlusive titles.
I don't think that any of the 3 systems will tank, however I don't think it is a forgone conclussion this time around.
1) PS3 Price and avaliablity is cutting into early adopters. The lack of major titles, and a number of companies saying they will nolonger be making PS exclusives. All of this might (can't say 100%) to a lack of games, or a lack of exclusive games.
2) The 360 already has a decent toehold in the USA (it is still tanking in Japan, however I honestly can't specuilate on the japanese market and how it will effect the systems as I am not familiar enough with it, from here on in, I am reffering to the USA). A number of PS2 owners have already picked up 360s because they want the next gen, but are not willing to wait for the PS3, or pay the price for it. This also gives the 360 a nice room for picking up exclusives (hey, look, our player base is 10X that of the PS3).
3) Wii. Who farken knows? I think that it will be decently common to see people havign a Wii as well as one of the other 2, plus those poeple that are straped for $$ will be either going for a Wii or a PS2.
I tihnk that in the USA the 360 will likely trounce the PS3, and the Wii either being a close second, or leading. In Japan, the PS3 will out do the 360, however I think that the Wii will easily outdo the PS3.
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got lots of counterexamples -- 3 emachines PCs, each about three years old, with 160 GB hardrives, cheapo power supplies and no fans besides the CPU heatsink one. All are running fine. My 2 x 250 Seagate drives at home have been running for close to a year and a half now and are fine.
I hate to say it, but you must be doing something wrong. How many other people have this problem of hard drives magically dying every few months?
Remember - No Free markets. (Score:4, Interesting)
I keep saying that there are no Free markets when it comes to "goods" protected by copyrights and / or patents.
This is a good example of people with monopolies in one area trying to leverage that to win in another market.
"exclusive titles" = copyright monopolies.
other market = media format / players.
Yes? No?
all the best,
drew
Re:I really don't care... (Score:4, Interesting)
BUT
You forget that a LARGE percentage of the population (At least in the U.S.) has children and small disposable incomes. Yes, there are plenty in the correct income range that have the disposable incomes to blow on HD equipment, but there are plenty more that don't, and don't want to have to blow the money.
My kids also watch TONS of DVDs. So many so, that we just had to replace the DVD player AGAIN because the old one wore out with use. (Autistic kids like the familiarity of DVDs, so we watch alot of them) What kind of DVD player did I buy? I bought a $120.00 DVD-VCR combo unit as our VCR was also wearing out. No HD-DVD, no Blu-Ray, just plain old DVD. I go through about one DVD player every 2 years or less because we play so many DVDs.
I actually use DVD shrink and duplicate all of our DVDs because if I didn't we would be re-buying all of our DVDs each year too because the kids are so rough with them. If you think I'm upset about the cost of the HD players, how do you think I feel about the cost of the HD Burners and the DRM contained on the Discs?
This whole HD format war debacle has me furious because it's just so damned obvious that the players involved don't give a damn about what the customers want, they just want to line thier pockets at our expense. At some point I'm just going to have to invest in 15 to 20 DVD players and about 300 DVD-R's because the format will go out of style and I won't be able to afford the new equipment anymore.
I'm just praying that the DVD Shrink people will figure a way around the DRM inherent on the new HD stuff because I need to be able to continue to duplicate my DVDs, as I can't afford to replace 30-40 HD-DVD's or BR-DVD's each year.
What is there to watch? (Score:3, Interesting)
Television shows are OK to watch in Hi-Def. I watch Smallville and (god, I hate to admit it) Enterprise on HD-Net every Monday night but I wouldn't buy either series in DVD format. That means you can forget about me spending extra money for it in either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, or Total Movie.
As for movies; movies STINK lately. This is where they could grab me, but they have failed miserably!
I have a Hi-Def, surround sound set up at home and I like nothing better than to sit on my comfortable couch with a two-liter Dr. Pepper and a bag of microwave popcorn and watch a good movie. I can pause the show when my wife and I want to argue about some plot point, or even return to a previous point in the show to show her just how wrong she is. :)
Just give me SOMETHING to watch!
Last year I wanted to see Mission: Impossible and Superman Returns, but having been burned in years past I procrastinated and missed them in the theaters. I rented then on DVD. Boy was I happy I had not wasted time and money trying to see these shows in an expensive theatre setting. And I'll clue you in on something that came to mind while I have been watching movies lately: Hi-Definition does NOT make the shows any better.
In summary, it doesn't matter which format "wins" if there is nothing to watch.
There was a good article in the December 10, 2006 New York Times by Richard Siklos entitled "The Hat Trick That Didn't Happen" in which it suggests that interest in Hi-Definition formats is actually declining among the population.
Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you think connection speeds are going to remain at their current levels? Right now I've got a cable connection that can download at over 1MB/sec .. sure an HD movie might be big, but I could probably download it (buffered) in about an hour.. which is only slightly longer than if i went to the video store and rented it..
I think the size of crap people want to download will keep growing faster than connection speeds, as it has done for decades.
An example: If an HD movie can't fit on a regular DVD, then we're talking about say, 10s of GB for the uncompressed movie. Even at your speeds, we're looking at quite a few hours to download a movie, assuming it comes through uncorrupted. My memories of multi-hour downloads from the BBS days are not good ones. Of course that brings higher compression levels into play, but that would completely defeat the purpose of watching an HD movie in the first place.
Bottom line is people don't want to put up with that crap. And now there's Netflix to throw into the fray, so one need not actually go to the video store. For such reasons, I really don't see the plastic disc getting obviated by downloading anytime soon. Not to mention the inherent lack of trust in HDDs - if all you're going to do is back the movie up onto a disc anyway, why not just buy the disc in the first place and cut out the HDD middleman?
Re:It's quite easy, really. (Score:3, Interesting)
What I don't understand is how an orginization the size of Sony behaves like a psychotic genious?
Yes, Sony is on my shitlist as well, mostly due to their usability, DRM and other psychosis ridden behaviors, but from a technical POV their proprietary stuff is actually technically sound, but they simply don't seem to want people to use it.
SDDS is at least as good as DTS for multi-channel sound. Both are better than DD. But Sony doesn't seem to want people to be able to use it, so who cares?
Although the minidisc may of had its issues, ATRAC, especially ATRAC3 is a good lossy encoder. But who cares? My car stereo has a licensed Sony technology where I can record onto a Sony memory stick via ATRAC3 compression. Its been a while since I read the manual, but all I remember was that the rules and regulations for even testing the recording capabilities of the deck just made it not worth the investment in a memory stick or my time to even test it.
SACD. Technically the best audio format one can get in their home. Sony doesn't want you to use it though. I had a SACD capable DVD/CD player and a Sony digital receiver. So, to play audio CDs or DVDs I can just put the disk into the player and use the digital out and the receiver will properly decode the signal and enjoy! Well, to enjoy a SACD from a Sony player on a Sony receiver I have to hook up 6 analog cables and hit a special button on the receiver to select the analog cables over the digital ones to play a SACD. Keep in mind that this is a multi-disk player, so when the player switches to or from a SACD disk everything is different although it is coming from the same player. WTF? So, I erroniously bought a SACD at the same time that I bought the SACD player, and haven't even listened to it all the way though. Try explaining to your wife, friend, babysitter, or whever, that the silver disk that looks just like every other CD or DVD but its "better" has to be played a special way from the same player and receiver even though they are all made by the same people.
WTF?
It simply does not matter how technologically good or even sufficient something is. If it can't be used or at least used the same way as everything else it simply won't be used. SDDS, ATRAC, SACD are basically worthless technology simply because Sony doesn't want people to use the stuff. The most sucessful is SDDS because they allow some movie theaters/producers to use the format, but Sony simply does not want to play nice with the rest of the 5 billion people on this planet.