Doom9: No Choice - thoughts on the format war

[admin]

Doom9 shares his thoughts on the high definition format wars, and comes to a conclusions ... there is no choice!

http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/no_choice.htm

[rago88]

Fantastic article.....

what a load of info....

[photo_angel2004]

The webpage cannot be found

[cynthia]

Works here. Perhaps you have a pop-up blocker installed or don't allow your webbrowser to link to other pages from the current one.

[admin]

I think Doom9 uses a few mirror servers, and some of them are not updated as quickly as others.

[locoeng]

Excellent article with a lot of good history and thoughts for the future for us.

[blutach]

There's still a lotta BD fanboys out there polluting threads all over the forums. Buggered if I know what they are trying to push. Perhaps they are SONY resellers.

Regards

[Chewy]

I cannot in good conscience recommend Blu-ray to anyone

kind of says it all

[admin]

I must say that BD fanbois are quite a force. Media statements from the Blu-ray camp often sound like they were written by such people, claiming "total victory" and "death of HD DVD" with quite regularity. There is no doubt that Blu-ray is winning at the moment, and I guess some people just prefer to back the winning team. And I'm guessing the amount propaganda coming out of the Blu-ray camp might highlight how concerned Sony is with Blu-ray's success (the "put all your eggs in one basket, call it the PS3 and price it way too expensive for consumers" strategy is a huge gamble).

However, with the recent Paramount/DreamWorks announcement of going HD DVD exclusive, the Blu-ray fans' fantasy of an outright victory within months has been shattered. But unfortunately, the HD DVD fanbois are starting to show up too, dreaming about Warner Bros. going HD DVD exclusive, and seeing signs everywhere that Fox and Disney are about to drop their Blu-ray only stance, when there is none.

I'm actually quite enjoying this little war, it's certainly done wonders to the price of hardware ... if you live in the US, you can get an HD DVD player plus 11 HD DVD movies for less than $US 300 from Amazon, with free shipping too. I think like a lot of people who love movies more than the actual formats that hold them, I will be going format neutral once dual-format standalones reach a reasonable price (with a bias towards HD DVD, of course).

[blutach]

IMHO, this exclusivity will eventually break down. Neither of the formats are going away soon and both will probably survive (like -R and +R blanks). The studios wanna sell disks, not players. They couldn't GAF about the how many PS3s are sold (except for the ultimate holding company of Columbia Pix). So, in my view, eventually, flicks in both formats will be the norm.

Still, I'd like to see which one is prevalent before I commit my $$$

Regards

[admin]

The Sony owned studios (Columbia/TriStars, MGM, Sony Pictures, and a couple of other smaller studios) will probably stay exclusive. Fox likes Blu-ray because it has BD+ and deliberately stopped releasing titles while waiting for BD+, so it's unlikely they will switch to HD DVD anytime soon unless BD+ gets cracked.

The rest will go neutral, I think, especially after cheap dual format players from LG and Samsung (plus Chinese brands) flood the market. I can't see companies like Sharp sticking to Blu-ray, when all their major competitors are making dual-format players.

[admin]

Ran across this article today:

http://www.videobusiness.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6471724&industryid=47283

This part I thought was interesting:

According to Paramount chief technology officer Alan Bell, a year of publishing in both formats has also taught the studio about the relative costs of the two formats to the content owner.

“With [HD DVD’s] HDi, you can do a lot of things with a couple of lines of code. But when you’re working with [Blu-ray’s] BD-Java, a simple menu command can mean hundreds of lines of code,” he said. “It’s much more complicated to work with.”

He also stressed the consistency and stability of HD DVD’s technical specifications.

“You don’t have different profiles or a lot of optional features as you do with Blu-ray,” he said. “It’s just a very straightforward spec. We found that we were doing all of our development work on HD DVD and then trying to port it over to Blu-ray, where you weren’t sure if every feature was going to work on every player, so you had to test it against all the different players. All of that goes into the cost delta for the studio.”

If the above is true, you do wonder how the BDA managed to screw things up so badly when it comes to interactivity and a stable spec, considering they had a head start on HD DVD to begin with.

I guess HD DVD has to thank Blu-ray only Disney for helping to create HDi.

[photo_angel2004]

There's still a lotta BD fanboys out there polluting threads all over the forums. Buggered if I know what they are trying to push. Perhaps they are SONY resellers.

Regards

I finally got that link to open to that page. Interesting read.

I personally think that they are spending way too much time and money on HD and blu ray.

I know a lot of people and I know NO ONE that has either of the 2 formats. I know NO ONE that wants to spend the $$$ on that technology as they all seem to think its a 100% waste of money as the difference in picture and sound quality is not that much better then DVD unless you have very high end hardware to play them off of and if you do how much better do we need to ger over DVD? I think if they spend less time and money on development of copy encryptions and more time and money on mass producing good quality DVD's and come down in price on DVD they would sell a lot more movies in General. I also think they should get rid of the region coding on all DVD's as that is just stupid. There are movies that are sold in other countries that are not sold here in the USA and movies in the USA that are not in other countires this would give people a chance to buy movies from other countries and they would play and would also give people from other countries a chance to get movies from the USA and they will play.


The way I see it there are too many different formats and so many players on the market that play some formats and not others, as a consumer that is a night mare as you have to keep buying a new freaking player every few months to be able to keep up with all the crap they are putting on these flicks.

If they keep it simple the sales would go up. People would be happy with what they buy and all would be well.

I personally dont think blu ray will go far. From what I see the stores here only have a few titles in stock for blu ray and they sit on the store shelves for a very long time. The same stores have thousands of DVD titles to choose from. I also think this is the wrong time for such technologies which may be a good thing. Our economy is nose diving more and more as time passes and more and more people are loosing jobs and homes and the homeless rate is climming to all time highs around here. Job loss= homeless = no money to buy.

Those that do still have a job are not spending on high ticket items as no one knows how long they will have their job. Retail stores are closing their doors right and left as there are not enough buyer for new nice things. Second hand stores and outlet stores are growing as there is a need for cheap.

So where does that leave blu ray - out the door. LMFAO

Granted not every state or every country is going down hill. But at least 50% of the USA is hurting BIG, that alone most likey has a large play in the number of people wanting to "copy" their dvd's so they dont loose their money if the disc gets damaged. For the most part in our state at least its not quality that is selling its what is cheap and what most people can afford that again leaves HD and Blu ray out in the cold. If they want to come out with some big ticket items such as blu ray, they should wait untill the economy turns around and sales are back up, wait until people have the money to spend.

Then again by them doing this now just may kill it all off and dvd will stay.
Just my thoughts on what I am seeing every day.

[admin]

I don't think HD is in "competition" with DVD - if anything, HD will be the successor to DVD. It's not meant for "right now", but rather, 2 or 3 years down the track when you can't even buy a SDTV set even if you wanted to.

Paramount is already considering dropping DVDs for some of the up and coming movies and released HD DVD+DVD combo discs only (these have HD DVD on one side, DVD on the other) - hopefully it won't cost too much more compared to regular new release DVDs. With the current Amazon sales, these combos cost around $US 22 each, which means it's actually cheaper to buy the 300 HD DVD combo disc than buying the 2-disc edition of 300 for example.

DVDs will still be around for a long time anyway since both HD formats are backwards compatible with DVD, perhaps as budget releases. In fact, buying a Blu-ray or HD DVD player actually extends the life of your exiting DVD collection because of the built in DVD upscalers.

[photo_angel2004]

I don't think HD is in "competition" with DVD - if anything, HD will be the successor to DVD. It's not meant for "right now", but rather, 2 or 3 years down the track when you can't even buy a SDTV set even if you wanted to.

Standard Tube TV's are already a thing of the past. I found this out last week. I am putting my 60" HD big screen up for sale to cover moving costs. I thought I would go and buy a cheap standard tube tv maybe a 42 inch for something to watch tv from in the living room and to my surprise not a single store had one. There were a few stores that has like 1 or 2 tube tv's but they were small like 15", to find one bigger then that seems already impossible. Things sure have changed in the past few years.

Everything around here new is now plasma or lcd, wide screen standard is gone.