Microsoft To Drop HD DVD

HockeyPuck writes to let us know that Microsoft has decided to stop making HD DVD players for the Xbox 360. No word on supporting Blu-ray on the platform though. "Microsoft said Saturday it would continue to provide standard warranty support for its HD DVD players. Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida last week estimated about 300,000 people own the Microsoft video player, sold as a separate $130 add-on for the Xbox 360."

Re:Royalties

[pddo]

Not too sure if they'll have to pay Sony (I think yes) but they'll have to pay Sun as all blueray menu's are now j2me driven... But i guess they are used to paying SUN.

Re:Online distribution of HD content take too much

[Kjella]

No, rips (not encodes) can be up to 50GB because the disc is 50GB, I don't know anyone who'd make a 27GB encode. Maybe you're confused with HDDVD rips that usually is close to 30GB? Encodes usually go for DVD5/720p and DVD9/1080p sizes, 1080p is 6x the pixels of 480p so roughly the same quality per pixel as a 2CD rip but with each pixel only being 1/6th the size in the total picture.

Remember there's a lot more headroom in the Blu-Ray standard, a regular DVD9 only in HD resolution would be 6xDVD9 = 54GB in MPEG2 but H264/VC-1 compresses a lot better so in reality you have more bandwidth per pixel on top of having a much higher resolution. Given the number of people that must be blind or something and can't tell HD from 480p, only a very small minority would be able to tell these rips from the real Blu-Ray disc. I'd say they're better than any HDTV you can get over the air in the states (ATSC is MPEG2 at 15-20GB/movie).

Re:Online distribution of HD content take too much

[mr_matticus]

Time to download too great. Compare that with going to a video store, and even today in the relative bandwidth backwater of the U.S. it's not such a big difference.

How, exactly, does a 15 minute trip to the video store (or a 30 second trip to the mailbox) compare to the 12-14 hours it would take to download a full quality BD file?

Bandwidth costs. I contend that online distribution is already *much* cheaper than by disc.

I doubt it. Blu-ray discs won't end up costing more than DVDs once the market hits its stride. It's not just the bandwidth costs (which I think you're lowballing anyway), but the hardware necessary to have file storage and availability to millions of customers and be able to push out the astronomical volumes of data that would be requested. In the end, the disc will be cheaper.

Compression.

BD is already highly, highly compressed. There's not really any way to compress it further without giving up significant quality, at which point, it's no longer a replacement for BD.

Freedom of discs. You need a Blu-ray player in the other room to play that disc. Or you can move your player around. But the same goes for your digital media player - have two or move it around.

So that's not much of a rebuttal. The benefit of discs is that they contain their own storage and don't require network access. You can watch them in places without high-speed networks, such as while traveling, on players that don't need hard drives. They are just as portable as files within their scope of use; you can bring them to a friend's house. There's also the psychological element of having the box and the disc; some people enjoy that physical connection. Discs will also have the special features, additional audio tracks, and other bonus content that downloads won't; again, some people don't care about those things, but many do.

The short answer is that by the time Blu-ray can be delivered digitally without any quality loss and without serious drawbacks in delivery time, something better than Blu-ray will be on the market. This BD replacement will outstrip our Internet connections, too. We'll be right back at physical media for the optimum quality. We're many, many years from networks that can completely outpace that.

Not quite

[Namarrgon]

• MS were pushing their VC-1 [wikipedia.org] codec, but that's available on both formats, not just HD-DVD.
• MS also licenced their HDi [wikipedia.org] interactivity platform and authoring tools to HD-DVD.
• Initial BD discs didn't have high-quality authoring tools available, so they had to use MPEG-2 instead. As a result, quality suffered.
• Most BD discs now use H.264/AVC [wikipedia.org], not VC-1. H.264 is also available for HD-DVD.

MS initially adopted a neutral approach to format support. They changed to supporting HD-DVD, citing its greater consumer friendlyness (lack of region coding, and mandatory support for managed copy). The Xbox player was clearly a response to the PS3's built-in player, while still hedging their bets as to which format might win eventually.

Re:This won't help the xbox

[Blkdeath]

PS3's are still over-priced for a game system as far as I am concerned.

What are the relative prices where you are? To get a console unit with an integrated hard drive and a bundled game I'm looking at $399 for either system at Future Shop in Ontario, Canada. Sure, to get an "Arcade" XBox 360 without a hard drive and with no games will only cost me $279.99, but hell, I don't want to start buying memory cards! These new consoles are supposed to be about rich multimedia experience, not about slow antique technology that's easy to lose/damage.

Moreover, the PS3 gives me integrated WiFi Internet access and an integrated BluRay player which means at the very least I won't have to deal with games spread across multiple discs but it can also double as a free high definition movie player.

Not only that, but Sony's SIXAXIS controllers actually change the way you game which is a far cry above 'XBox with better graphics and sound'.

I've evaluated all three consoles (Wii, XBox 360 and PS3) and have decided that the best bang for my dollar hands down is the PS3. I really and truly felt that the XBox 360 was nothing more than a polish to the original XBox and therefore not worth another investment. My comparison was based solely on technical merits and improvements relative to previous generation of consoles but it doesn't help Microsoft's case when I'm constantly hearing of 360s heating up to absurd levels (including my friends' which felt damn close to scalding levels) and the dreaded red rings of death that are prevalent enough that MS were forced to extend their console's warranty coverage.

Note that I fully understand that both represent evil conglomerates, but by the same token my computer runs Windows XP and displays on my Sony HD television set so developer bias didn't enter into my decision in the slightest. Also, I do own an original XBox in the special translucent green colouring along with about 30-odd games.

Re:This won't help the xbox

[Concern]

Actually, Dreamcast used a proprietary "GD-ROM" [wikipedia.org] with a storage capacity of 1.2GB. You're still right in your main point, although I would have put it differently. It's highly unlikely that game disc swapping had much to do with Dreamcast's end. Sega had had a run of failures, culminating in Saturn, that cost them the confidence of partners and consumers alike. That made them vulnerable to Sony at the outset (with major players like EA publicly stating they would not develop for another Sega platform), but the PS2's capability as an extremely cheap DVD player (not much difference in price to buy a DVD-player or a PS2, in 2000, 2001) was thought by many to be a major factor in its success.

Dreamcast _could_ play games on CD-ROM. Though I'm sure by the end, Sega wished it couldn't. Mid-way through the system's life, crackers discovered a ROM exploit that allowed burned discs to boot in the Dreamcast. CD images were soon all over the net, and playable without a mod-chip. Amusingly, the crackers compensated for the loss of headroom on the 700GB CD-ROMs (from the 1.2GB GD-ROM originals) without too much trouble; in many cases, all the space hadn't been used. In others, they simply downsampled sounds and textures; the results were usually unnoticeable. All but a few games ended up online that way.

As time passes and media decays, this will probably ensure the survival of the Dreamcast catalog for future generations to enjoy. So it goes with all platforms.

Dreamcast was a pretty awesome console for the interregnum between PS/N64 and PS2/XBox. They had about a year of being the best thing on the market in terms of graphics, network connectivity, etc. and sported neat ideas i.e. "tamagotchi" memory cards. They had a few of the best titles of the time as exclusives.

Although it was tragic for Sega and for gamers (I recall in 2001 watching the Jet Grind Radio team bursting into tears on the stage at GDC while accepting an award), its failure did at least put an amazing game system in the hands of many who otherwise couldn't have afforded it. I still recall $50 dreamcasts (the cost of a new PS2 game got you a whole system!) and $5 games... there haven't been many deals like that before or since.

Re:Royalties

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't Microsoft have to pay Sony royalties on blu-ray players if they were installed into 360's?

Blu-ray != Sony bla bla bla...

Blu-ray was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association whose board of directors include Hitachi, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK, bla bla bla...

Re:Royalties

[abigor]

Why do people have the idea that Sony somehow has exclusive rights to Blu-Ray? The Blu-Ray Disc Association is a collection of a whole bunch of companies, many of whom were involved in the format's development. Sony is just one of these companies. Some others are Apple, HP, Sun, Matsushita, etc. etc.

Re:This won't help the xbox

[zbaron]

Sony developed a scratch resistant layer ...

It was TDK that developed the scratch resistant coating.