Why Blu-Ray will make it when SACD, DVD-A, and HD-DVD won't

[Chris Gerhard]

Just because I think Blu-Ray will "win", doesn't mean that I think it's the best. "The Best" is irrelevent in the commercial world. I'm sure there were deals made to correct the mistakes of other new format launches that are stacking the favor of Blu-Ray over HD-DVD, and that may be bad news for some. It's hard to say.

I am frankly surprised that HD-DVD is putting up such little fight. It's almost like Toshiba is being left out there to hang on it's own. Except for the XBOX (another video game deal), what else is there for HD-DVD.

Another sad state of the format war. UGH!

As far as disc based home recording goes, I don't think it's that important these days. Most "hi-tech" homes have DVRs for their cable and satellite, which take over the "time shifting" element of the VCR. And when someone wants something saved for posterity (weddings, etc), they do that on their PCs. I am not sure what the requirement for HD would be for personal recordings.

Time will tell.............

Toshiba is selling players really cheap and offering great promotions so I look at it as Toshiba fighting hard trying to keep the format afloat. After negotiations and discussions for years prior to launch, no company other than Toshiba had agreed to manufacture a player and we are still waiting for the first stand alone player to carry the HD DVD logo made by a company other than Toshiba. I do think many companies decided supporting only one format was best and that was a big reason so many are exclusive to Blu-ray. Some companies required different and better security to sign on with Blu-ray and Blu-ray agreed. HD DVD's strategy of less DRM and region free is a big reason it has the support it does from consumers.

I think the Toshiba players are very good and only wish the company had made Blu-ray players instead but with the same quality. Technical specifications sure make Blu-ray look like the best format to me but the format war won't be decided on the technical merits.

Chris

 

[lolbroek]

The price-strategy Toshiba is playing might bite them up the ass in the long run. Discounting your products may be a good short-term strategy but you can't do that in the long run because a) it's not viable and b) it also gives your product an inferior image (marketing 101 for that last one, I agree, but research does seem to corroborate it).

 

[neil wilkes]

Both formats are broken.
Sorry Jon, but I just do not see Blu Ray cutting it at all. It's just too darned expensive for the licenses. Sony DADC are charging £20,000 per title just for the license & use of the name & AACS copy protection. HD DVD makes no such charge.
Authoring is close to impossible due to the expense of the packages - and this is *not* likely to change.
Right now, to actually create releasable content you need either
A - Sonic Scenarist 4, at $150,000
B - Sony Blu Print.
ALL other "Blu Ray" authoring packages are for BD-R only and the output cannot be accepted for replication. No CMF, no DDP 3, and it is apparently going to remain this way - Sony will *not* license this.
So all home users cannot create replicatable discs. Only large studios.

The soon coming specchange is also not going near to far enough.
BD-J is going to become mandatory.
PIP is not.
Internet/Network connectivity is not.
The latter might not seem like much until you realise that a heck of a lot of the active content that is so heavily touted will be distributed by a permanently on internet connection, ditto copy protection. Certain titles will simply refuse to play without network connectivity. This will cause a lot of trouble after October.

Finally.
PAL support is actually not in the specs at all. This is for both formats.
25fps is unavailable.
50i is not supported, and is not looking likely to be either.
24p is not the answer, as all 24p discs are run through 3:2 pulldown to 29.97 NTSC on the fly.
(This is why all HD is dead in Europe. It's Asia vs Europe vs Yanks.)
What is needed is ONE, SINGLE, UNITED format. This excludes both BD and HD DVD, as both are fatally flawed.
1080p is HD.
1080i is not. (720p is actually higher definition than 1080i, but all Joey Sixpack sees is the numbers and as usual, gets it wrong).

The Chinese will not pay Sony's licenses. This is perhaps the main reason BD is already dead, but just won't lie down yet.

 

[JonUrban]

Neil,

I understand where you're coming from. I'm just stating what I see over here. In the circles of people I interface with, they seem to be very aware of Blu-Ray. As I said, it's marketing. Whether these people actually go out and buy the stuff is another thing all together, but I can tell you this. The "Disney" angle of this is big. The more Disney titles out there in Blu-Ray, the more of an advantage the format will have.

It's amazing that it's like that, but it is.......


Go figure.

 

[atrocity]

Sony DADC are charging £20,000 per title just for the license & use of the name & AACS copy protection. HD DVD makes no such charge.
Authoring is close to impossible due to the expense of the packages - and this is *not* likely to change.
Right now, to actually create releasable content you need either
A - Sonic Scenarist 4, at $150,000
B - Sony Blu Print.
ALL other "Blu Ray" authoring packages are for BD-R only and the output cannot be accepted for replication. No CMF, no DDP 3, and it is apparently going to remain this way - Sony will *not* license this.
So all home users cannot create replicatable discs. Only large studios.

DVD and CD did just fine without the initial ability to create discs at home. I don't disagree with your apparent point that Sony are a bunch of arrogant jerks, but none of what you mention above is likely to be relevant to the people who just want to half-watch something at home while alternating phone calls with beating the kids.

In fact, it's that latter point that may doom both formats: The people most likely to buy anything in large numbers just don't care about quality, especially when that quality is much more incrementally better to SD-DVD than SD-DVD is to VHS. DVD compared to VHS offered better video, better audio, smaller storage needs, random access and (after a while) lower prices. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray offer some interesting fancy bonuses, but all most people are going to be aware of is the higher quality...and I don't think many will care. I could see both HD formats being the next Laserdisc, which I'm sure is not what the creators would want, but wouldn't be the end of the world.

I'm not slamming either HD format, I'm actually complimenting the original DVD. In a lot of ways, they truly got it right back in 1997, so much so that even gadget freaks like me just aren't in a hurry to move on to the next format, *especially* in the middle of a format war.

The worst thing about Sony's pricing arrogance when it comes to disc manufacturing is the obvious fact that a lot of low-budget stuff will simply never get released. Those who find pleasure in "Night of the Scantily Clad Zombie Cheerleaders Meet Dracula's Psychiatrist's Rabid Ocelot" will have zero incentive to upgrade since it won't be cost-effective for anyone to issue stuff like that on Blu-Ray.

 

[soesbeout]

It sounds like basic advertising 101,no matter how bad it is you just have to have a hook name to grab them.Blue-ray sounds soooo cool gotta get that don't know what it is but I need one.

 

[timbre4]

I suspect that Blu-Ray will succeed on the consumer video front but that we'd not get our hands on it as a recording format within reason.

That's okay with me because DVD-A tools exist for my projects already...

 

[Old Quad Guy]

I suspect that Blu-Ray will succeed on the consumer video front but that we'd not get our hands on it as a recording format within reason.

I'm format neutral. Although it's way too early to tell, HD-DVD or some other HD format will be around as an alternative to Sony's licensing fee's - wouldn't you think? The fact that you can now make your own HD content at home and that we live in a "You Tube" world means that aspiring film makers will need some sort of inexpensive way to mass produce HD content. The ability to make good looking professional films for cheap is too irresistible. They're not going to wait 10 years for Sony to slowly exploit the Blu-Ray format. Also, small film studios that need to do small HD runs of old obscure films will choose an alternative to Sony's licensing fee's if Sony doesn't drop them. History has shown us Sony's unwillingness to change and a whole new industry came about with VHS. Still, Blu-Ray has the backing of the major studios and that should count for almost everything. But then there's this:
HD DVD Promotional Group http://www.hddvdprg.com/eng/index.html

Maybe if we get lucky they'll release all in one player/recorders that will make both formats as moot as to whether to buy DVD-R or DVD+R.

 

[JonUrban]

I vote to ban Lord Hawthorne from the forum immediately!

"Lord Hawthorne" has a lifetime "Get out of being banned" card.
It would be impossible to ban him!

 

[Chris Gerhard]

After reading Neil's post, I tried to determine if either format is fatally flawed for the US market. It seems just the opposite to me, for the current display technology, this is as good as we will likely ever see with any consumer owned media. I don't know how long this technology will last, but the NTSC system sure lasted a long time and I expect this to last longer. Blu-ray meets or exceeds all other possible HDTV sources here and looks so much better than OTA, cable, and satellite and I use them all. There are no technical issues I can find that render either format fatally flawed. Unfortunately there isn't much of a market interested in either until only one is left, and for a significant share of the market DVD is plenty good enough. I still believe one format can succeed and Blu-ray is the only one with a chance to win the idiotic format war. Having to launch before the specifications were final is unfortunate but the players work well enough that most consumers, myself included are delighted with the performance. Watching a movie on Blu-ray or HD DVD is a treat for us. The software selection isn't much, but if a market exists that will improve. I just hope a market exists and the sooner the better.

Years from now, we may see HDTV with better codecs and much higher bitrates that will look even better, but I don't believe that will be delivered to the consumer on 5" shiny discs.

Chris

 

[Quadzilla]

"Lord Hawthorne" has a lifetime "Get out of being banned" card.
It would be impossible to ban him!

Could I have one of those please?

 

[timbre4]

Speaking of THD (Blu-Ray/HD-DVD)....

It's being delayed until early 2008; read the story in Video Business here: http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6456115.html

I'll go out on a limb and predict it will NOT be necessary and NEVER be issued. Because the war will be over before the big Christmas push if the studio players have any sense.

 

[JonUrban]

Here's what I mean about the names:

Walked into a store, asked for HD-DVD

Was shown the Blu-Ray discs. I said, no, I mean HD-DVD. He said Blu-Ray *was* HD-DVD.

Unreal...........................

 

[Old Quad Guy]

After sorting through many HD articles I found this one informative:

In DVD War, Body Blows for Toshiba
Blockbuster's backing is the latest victory for Sony's Blu-ray in the
high-definition DVD format race, but don't count out Toshiba just yet

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2007/tc20070624_765772.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

 

[Quadzilla]

It's a shame it even had to come to this.

Well Jon, I have the utmost respect for your opinions, BUT I will tell you EXACTLY why Bly-Ray will fail ... because I just bought one. Yes, the kiss of death for any format. I jumped into quad with both feet, I still have a Betamax, and I bought one of the very first DVD-Audio players. In my favour though, I never thought that DualDisc would make it ... but then who really did?

I still have that $2,000 Toshiba SD-9200 copper-chassis door-stop. I can't bring myself to get rid of it, so it has been exiled to my 2-channel system to play stereo 96/24 audio DVDs. Even if it could play DVD-Audio disks ... which it can't do very well ... it is moot anyway at this point.

So, now I have a Blu-Ray player. It would have been a wiring nightmare, had I not had the good sense to buy a Zektor 6-channel switching unit a few months back. Its 4 sets of multichannel inputs are now full ... a Pioneer DV-47Ai (for DVD-Audio), a Sony SCD-C222ES (for SACD), and the two DBX 200 units that control all of my legacy quadraphonic decoders and tape machines (3 of each). The last set has the honour of my new Bly-Ray player. For sentimental reasons, my quad stuff are connected to Input 4.

Stay tuned. It won't be long before I kill off another one. Pick up those Blu-Ray titles while you can. It is only a matter of time before they hit the Shocker Log. In the mean time, it is a pretty thing to look at. Cheers, Mike.

 

[JonUrban]

Mike,

What kind of Zektor switch do you have? I might be needing one!

 

[Quadzilla]

Mike,

What kind of Zektor switch do you have? I might be needing one!

It is a model HDS4.1 Component Video Switch. Although it is marked to switch 2-channels of audio and 4 of video, the circuitry is identical in all channels, and they even promote it as a 6-channel audio switcher. I can tell you that it is very high quality, and I am picky. It has digital switching too, but I don't use that part of it.

It is even remote controllable. Instead of a learning remote control, the Zektor unit learns from whatever remote control you have. Very cool actually. I bought mine from a place in New Jersey over the Internet ... RAM electronics. They were very good to deal with ... $259. THEY EVEN SHIP TO CANADA WITH NO CRAPOLA!

http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/zektor.htm#hds4

 

[bmoura]

Well Jon, I have the utmost respect for your opinions, BUT I will tell you EXACTLY why Bly-Ray will fail ... because I just bought one. Yes, the kiss of death for any format. I jumped into quad with both feet, I still have a Betamax, and I bought one of the very first DVD-Audio players. In my favour though, I never thought that DualDisc would make it ... but then who really did?

I still have that $2,000 Toshiba SD-9200 copper-chassis door-stop. I can't bring myself to get rid of it, so it has been exiled to my 2-channel system to play stereo 96/24 audio DVDs. Even if it could play DVD-Audio disks ... which it can't do very well ... it is moot anyway at this point.

So, now I have a Blu-Ray player. It would have been a wiring nightmare, had I not had the good sense to buy a Zektor 6-channel switching unit a few months back. Its 4 sets of multichannel inputs are now full ... a Pioneer DV-47Ai (for DVD-Audio), a Sony SCD-C222ES (for SACD), and the two DBX 200 units that control all of my legacy quadraphonic decoders and tape machines (3 of each). The last set has the honour of my new Bly-Ray player. For sentimental reasons, my quad stuff are connected to Input 4.

Stay tuned. It won't be long before I kill off another one. Pick up those Blu-Ray titles while you can. It is only a matter of time before they hit the Shocker Log. In the mean time, it is a pretty thing to look at. Cheers, Mike.

Hmm, are you planning to settle the whole Hi Def Video format war by buying an HD-DVD player as well ?!

 

[Rck60s]

Paramount and Dreamworks just signed on exclusive HD-DVD today...This is going to get really stupid

 

[BananaSlug]

This is going to get really stupid

Here in America we wouldn't have it any other way.