Warner Backs Blu-Ray. End Times For HD-DVD? 705
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times reports: In addition to Apple, Warner Brothers is now going to throw its weight behind the Blu-ray format for high-definition disks. Warner has been the only major studio to publish its movies in both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. Today, the studio announced that from now on, it would only issue movies in Blu-ray.
Richard Greenfield, the media analyst with Pali Research, wrote that this marks the end of the format wars: "We expect HD DVD to 'die' a quick death.""
What's that sound? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hope it works... (Score:3, Interesting)
They hold in their hand a peice of paper.... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is one player left who will likely fight on, that being microsoft. They absolutely don't want blu ray to succeed, because that means they lose another round to Sony.
Should be fun seeing how they react.
About time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hope it works... (Score:5, Interesting)
If there's a silver lining here it's that I think winning this race is meaningless. I don't think blu-ray is the next DVD. Laserdisc maybe.
Re:They hold in their hand a peice of paper.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft only has itself to blame if HD DVD fails. They could have bundled the HD DVD drive into the 360 (e.g. the top end "Elite" model), or promoted the external add-on more but they didn't. I suspect they know the format was doomed and didn't want any of their IP to get dragged down with it. Microsoft also have ambitions with downloadable content and may have perceived that ANY dominant physical HD format is a threat. This may explain why they've been propping up HD DVD, to prolong the war and sow confusion, but not wishing either side to actually win.
There were even rumours circulating this week that they might licence XBox 360 technology to other manufacturers. This was probably so that Toshiba could produce some HD DVD / 360 hybrid under their own brand and keep Microsoft out of the picture if it tanked. I wonder what will happen if there was substance to that rumour. I can't help but think an HD DVD / 360 device would be stillborn so it may be the first casualty of this announcement.
cheap if you order them from the US... (Score:2, Interesting)
the real question, i suppose, is: do i feel bad HD-DVD might now disappear? no -- because that nice new samsung dual-format player is being released as we speak. i was planning to buy that anyway, as a handful of movies i like are on blu-ray, at which point i can forget about the whole sorry mess and move on...
Re:Well guess what ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Frankly, this just reinforces my decision to only buy combo discs if at all. Which means, since I've never heard of BD combo in the wild, I'll be buying plain jane DVDs from Warner in the future.
Re:What's that sound? (Score:5, Interesting)
The consumers already descided. [engadget.com] Blockbuster supported both then discovered that more people bought blue ray by a significant margin.
The previous articles putting the two in a dead heat could do so only by discounting the number of PlayStation 3 owners by not counting it as a player even though most of the time when I ask for blue ray player prices they just tell me to buy a PS 3 in case I ever want to play games. Without the PS3 the number of players is almost even with the PS3 the numbers are deep into Blue Ray's favour.
Why anyone thought that fudging the numbers was a good move is beyond me.
Re:Not likely (Score:2, Interesting)
There are 2 inhibitory factors. Firstly the we have the cost issiue. Blue-ray disks are so expensive right now. I think the studios are sabotaging themselves by charging so much money for them. It's easy to forget that although in the US GDP per capita has gone up like crazy since the 1970s that's really only benefited a small segment of society - 10%. The only way the average Joe has done better is by both partners working and not by much. Since 1980, US gross domestic product (HDP) per capita has increased 67%[1], while median household income has only increased by 15%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income [wikipedia.org] For individual income the situation is even worse. In 1970 adult US median income in 2004 dollars was $28,100. In 2004 it was $30,513. Thats only 8.6% higher in 34 years in real terms. But now people have significant college loans to pay back. In real terms many are poorer as a consequence. So people have very little wiggle room. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
Of course if you want to market stuff to the top 1% with average income above $1.7 million (aprox for 2006) then you can sell them fancy shit. But not the the average Joe. Big corporations need to remember that using debt to get people to buy more stuff only works in the short term. Eventually people get maxed out - like now. Then all of a sudden people can't afford any higher prices. If the studios had any sense of their own best interest they would make peace in the format war, charge for an HD disk what a regular DVD now costs and discount DVDs. Within 2 years we would all see massive uptake of the new technology and everyone would be a winner.
The second inhibitory factor is the format war and its consequences. I bought my first DVD player for my computer in 1998. I would buy an HD player now if there was not a format war. It looks to me that this war is stalemated for now. I see downloads becoming more and more prevalent as people wait for the HD war to resolve itself. The thing is though, that by 2013, maybe even by 2012, there will be enough bandwidth so that most US high speed connections will be able to download HD content. Now there will be DRM issues and storage issues. But I am betting they will figure that stuff out. But Apple, Microsoft, Lg-Netflix ect will be providing the service and making money and Sony and Toshiba will be cut out completely. Of course Sony's studio will still make money from such a model.
This is such a shame. I would prefer a physical medium that works right now. It would also provide competition to downloads so that they wouldn't otherwise be able to have such extreme DRM terms and conditions.
Re:most people still have small screens (Score:3, Interesting)
I do see a tremendous difference between SD and HD channels on broadcast. It's illustrative to switch between the SD and HD versions of the same event to see just how drastic the change is. It's like you're not even watching the same broadcast. Oddly enough though, not every sports venue has upgraded their cameras. I can see one football broadcast that looks like washed out crap on HD and then the one following it has the HD quality I'm used to.
Re:NPD numbers (Score:2, Interesting)
I am a alittle surprised at slashdot opinion here though. BD is a superior format with higher disk capacity and higher bandwidth. I was surprised to see so many preferring dvd. This is a group I wouldv'e expected to like HD formats in general with an edge to BD. Instead I see numerous people saying that can't even see the difference between hd media and dvd. I've had a HD set for years now getting a BD player this summer and the difference between dvd and bd is very apparent to me.
Re:Dear Hollywood (Score:5, Interesting)
"Most people that have a good HDTV can tell a large difference in good HD content."
You mean, some people _think_ they can tell the difference (notably TV salesmen and people who've bought a HDTV).
Despite many agreeing with you, I cannot, because like so many things in consumer electronics, users are too often fooled into thinking they're assessing one thing when they're assessing another.
To begin, "good HD content" is already qualitative rather than quantitative. HDLite seems prevalent on DirecTV - please see http://www.stophdlite.com/ [stophdlite.com] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Lite [wikipedia.org] (probably in that order). I'd consider it "good HD content" and appreciate it a lot compared to SD - but it's not highest quality HD, as might be found with the OTA ABC or CBS broadcasts. What we call HD Lite is more along the lines of what you get from good DV tape - which I'll admit might qualify as "good HD content" but isn't HD.
Next - and I'm going to contradict myself a little bit w.r.t. the above paragraph and I'm ok with that - comes native resolution of the TVs themselves. My DLP has a native res of 1280x720p. The sign at the store calls it a 1080i set - because it accepts and converts 1920x1080i to native (all HDTVs convert whatever to their native formats) - so you have to beware of marketing crap. I haven't looked at the latest models, but most plasmas sold to the date I'd checked last year were native of 1024x768, and LCDs are very often 1366(or so)x768 native res. On those models, you're not going to get 1-to-1 mapping of HD anything without processing inside the TV - so like it or not, further signal degradation occurs in the format changeover.
Next, not all HDTV inputs are created equally. See http://www.dbstalk.com/ [dbstalk.com] if you're a satellite TV user (or want to check my references) and you'll see plenty of newbie posts answered by very qualified TV engineers telling that no, they're not crazy, for their set / brand / production run, the component inputs are noticably better than their HDMI inputs or no, they're not crazy, for the same reasons, the HDMI inputs are noticably better than the component inputs.
Next, tuners. I have 3 ATSC tuners in my house, until recently, two were hooked to the same DLP HDTV - and just switching between the two caused guests - drinking beer and watching the game - to exclaim, "WTF did you just do?!?!?" So, even though the source could be qualified as "good HD content" the differences in h/w quality was easily observable by people with no vested interests in oooohs and aaaaahs of HDTV ownership.
Next, cabling. Yes, yes, yes, anyone paying too much for cables is an idiot. Try it. 'Nuff said. Now add in store cabling (have you ever worked in a consumer electronics store?) and you'll know all bets are off for controlling that part of your experiment.
Next, as you point out, color engines. Two HDTVs with same native resolutions? The one with the better color engine wins everytime - in fact, it's often been shown that given the choice between higher native res and color engine, spend the money on the better engine. My Helio Ocean phone with its 2 megapixel camera looking like crap (knew it before I bought it, didn't care) is an excellent proof point on this.
Next, SD upconverters built in to HDTVs all vary - and there are some very scary good ones. Ditto on set-top boxes.
Finally - the source material itself. Hitchhiker's Guide on HD (Lite) is better than on DVD - it's slight, but not subtle. I switched between the two without telling my wife what the switch was (to see if it was just my bias, as you suggest), and got one of those, "WTF did you just do?" moments again. Take something that really cared about HD during production and it's just no contest.
So - there's a lot more to HD comparisons and good HD content and what to invest in the HDTV world than just what
Re:BluRay is slightly better for sw players (Score:3, Interesting)
This is interesting. It's an area I know little about. Isn't the decoding of the content off-loaded to the graphics card normally, and doesn't this mean that a quad-core CPU doesn't help?
Not meant as a challenge - interested in more information.
Re:What's that sound? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well of course they do. If two groups are targetting a market of a billion+, they're not going to say, "oh dear, of the first three million sold we only got 25% lets abandon our investment now." The market has barely been scratched. By the time it's even a tenth of the way to being fully exploited, dual-format players will likely be in the same price range as single format players (it's not as though the manufacturing cost is wildly different and it's a great selling point), so there will be plenty of market for both. Besides, what I'm hearing a lot of, is people saying they prefer HD for the stability of the format and the lack of region coding (and other DRM issues). So I think the vast numbers of people out there who haven't bought in yet, are very significant. They represent a vast untouched market that any company would love to get a slice of. You're not thinking just how much money 10% of all the TV owners out there represents. It's enormous! If you can claim that 10% of the market and you don't, any CEO would be rightly kicked out by the company's investors.
HD will certainly be around long enough for dual-format to be the norm (you only need a tiny difference in title releases between formats to make dual-format appealing to the hardware purchaser), and once that happens, both formats have survived the critical format war stage.
Re:Hell Freezing Over? Sony Actually WON!? (Score:3, Interesting)
Vote Cthulu when you're tired of choosing from the lesser of two evils.
Offloading HD/BR decoding to the graphics card? (Score:5, Interesting)
(In fact, SoftDVD was capable of handling 30 fps even without hw assists, running on a PentiumMMX 300 Mhz cpu, and without dropping any frames, but having the motion comp hw made it much easier to avoid drops. BTW, I did a very small bit of asm optimization work on that sw player.)
High bitrate HD/BR video is encoded using the CABAC (Content-Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding) algorithm, which provides slightly better compression rates, but which is also particularly unsuited to a GPU: Each decoding step requires multiple if/then/else stages, just to decode a single bit of information. It is also completely serial, in that you normally cannot determine the context to use for the next decoded bit until you've finished the current bit and possibly even branched on the result!
When you need to do this more than 50 million times/second, CABAC becomes the real bottleneck.
OK?
Terje
Re:What's that sound? (Score:3, Interesting)
You're not wasting money if all you want to watch is the movies that are currently available on HD-DVD, but in the future (at least until HD is easily available via cable) you may want to watch a new release in HD at home and you won't be able to, because HD-DVD as a format is not going to exist.
People with Blu-ray player can also pick up existing movies and they will also be able to watch new releases, again until HD is easily available via cable, and even then they may want to buy a hard copy for all the extra content and whatever.
We all know that HD-DVD players and discs isn't going to somehow cease to exist in a few months, but there won't be any new stuff for you to enjoy at some point. So on that level you're wasting your money buy buying deeper into the HD-DVD format.
Blu-ray players not cheap enough (Score:3, Interesting)
The real winner of the format war is... BitTorrent (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Looks like the writing is on the wall for HD DV (Score:2, Interesting)