HD-DVD is Dead (was: First Signs of Blu-Ray Dominance)
- Thread starter John Crichton
- Start date
trancejeremy
Adventurer
Banshee16 said:
Supposedly Blu-Ray has a scratch resistant coating. I dunno though, since I've never even seen a Blu Ray disc.
I don't really care which is better, I just don't like Toshiba, because I have one of their regular DVD players and I hate it. Besides the fact it developed trouble with dual layer flipper discs (like Buck Rogers and Kolchak - I also hate Universal for using them in the first place) a month after I got it (Most players do eventually have trouble, but this was quick), it has the most irritating feature ever - when you hit the 'open' button when it's off, instead of opening, it turns on and loads the disc which takes 30 seconds. Ugh. If I wanted to turn it on, I would have turned it on, I pressed the open tray button because I wanted the tray open.
If their HD players were anything like that (and they were basically the only people making them), ugh!
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Banshee16 said:
That's only with regards to the "internet connectivity" which has been completely pointless in practice and the Picture in Picture commentary. Which again seems to be less than impressive. PiP is cute and has the potential to be interesting or useful in the future, but that's going to take some re-thinking as to how they do commentaries and use the feature.
Banshee16 said:
Disks are fundamentally a storage medium, more storage is never useless. It means you can use less or no compression (which always has downsides), more special features and/or ones of higher quality, fewer disks, etc... A 50% edge in storage per layer is not an insignificant edge. Blu-ray has the potential for further growth in the future, much as DVDs improved on CDs as a storage medium.
Banshee16 said:
Yes, the cost of extra content has certainly prevented anyone from releasing DVDs with extra content. So obviously it precludes it for Blu-Ray, like the bare bones release of Blade Runner.
Banshee16 said:
Well, having dual format disks certainly proved to be a major advantage for HD-DVD didn't it. No wait it was a complete flop. The dual format disks were more expensive than standard DVDs since they involved gluing a HD-DVD and a regular DVD together, they had some compatability problems and sold to essentially nobody who didn't have a HD-DVD player already. Which completely negated the point of the dual format disks in the first place.
Banshee16 said:
Yes the physical disks are somewhat more expensive at the moment, but the actual production cost of the disks is not a major portion of the cost of a Blu-Ray release (probably no more than 10% at most) and that is something that will drop rapidly as economies of scale start to kick in. DVDs were similarly expensive at this stage of their introduction.
Banshee16 said:
Yes, the PS3 is the best and most future proof of the Blu-Ray players, however given that the PS3 is fully upgradeable to the 2.0 "final" spec Sony has hardly stranded a lot of early adopters. Most older players aren't going to be able to be upgraded to either the 1.1 or 2.0 spec, but given that most of these players were $500-1,000 dollars they were only selling to people who have more than enough money to replace them and probably would be doing so any way to get the latest bells and whistles.
It's not like DVDs have been static in terms of features or capabilities. My old DVD player has neither an HDMI, nor a DVI, nor upscaling, is larger, heavier, etc...
Banshee16 said:
The lawsuit against samsung has nothing to do with the 1.0/1.1/2.0 spec issues. They produced a lousy player and haven't done much to fix it.
Banshee16 said:
Blu-ray won based on numbers. It won on numbers because of the PS3, which has sold something like 10x the numbers of stand alone HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players combined. So that even with the slow adoption of the High-Def formats, the Blu-Ray movies were outselling the HD-DVD versions by a factor of x2 or x3.
Banshee16 said:
The Blu-ray disks do not scratch any easier than DVDs. An early version of the Blu-Ray technology, which was sold as a storage medium was vulnerable to being damaged by scratches. So they came in a shell which protected them from being scratched. The consumer Blu-ray disks use an evolved version of the original disks with a much tougher coating that makes them no more vulnerable to being scratched than DVDs, HD-DVDs or CDs are. None of them are immune either.
Aaron L
Hero
trancejeremy said:
Well, for the sake of experimental curiosity, I took a blank blu-ray disk and vigorously rubbed at it with the edge of a CD, and then rubbed at a different CD with the edge of the first CD. The CD I rubbed got a fair gouge, but it produced nothing but a smudge on the blu-ray disk that was easily wiped off with a micro-fiber cloth. So, take it for what it's worth. However, all disks may not be made to the same exacting standards.
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Paramount, the last studio hold out, has now stated they will be releasing movies on Blu-Ray.
http://www.news.com/All-Hollywood-studios-now-back-Blu-ray/2100-1026_3-6231443.html?tag=nefd.top
http://www.news.com/All-Hollywood-studios-now-back-Blu-ray/2100-1026_3-6231443.html?tag=nefd.top
John Crichton
First Post
Everyone is going to fall in line now. Amazon.com did the Best Buy thing, too.
John Crichton said:
Well, if Toshiba is not producing the players anymore, it really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that companies will shift what they're selling. Content that can't be played, because nobody's making the machines is kind of useless.
I'm pretty sure that things aren't going to go nearly as smoothly as Sony would like though. Aside from the problems with their players, and the perception by much of the public that regular DVDs on an upscaling player produce quality almost as good as Blu-Ray or HDDVD, you're not going to get people running to pick them up.
In addition, we're either in, or going into a recession (well US is, Canada is teetering, but might not cross over), and during recessions people buy fewer luxury items (ie. high definition DVD players). I'm pretty sure that that has a lot to do with the decrease in DVD business over the last year, which was one of the justifications Warner made in their announcement when they switched. They might have partly misidentified *why* movie sales were going down.....or at least not given that situation enough credit.
I guess we'll see, given time. I know plenty of people who are switching into "save, and pay off debt mode", and moving out of the "buy cool new stuff" mode. If you're not sure about your job because people are getting laid off, are you going to withhold spending $400 on a player because you're not sure which format will be around in a year? Or because you want to have that $400 in your savings, in case you lose your own job?
Banshee
Aaron L said:
That's good to know....
I don't know how that compares against HDDVD disks. I'm not willing to buy an $18 blank disc (price at Future Shop) to test it out, either
Even without scratching, there are all kinds of other factors as well, though. Heat and cold can affect the discs, and they can be damaged by contact with air (ie. regular aging) from what I understand. At least that's what I have been told by several professional photographers, who pointed out that DVDs are not an ideal means of storing photos etc. as they can become unreliable with time. Whether there's any truth to that, I don't know. They claimed to have gained that information through PK offered by DVD production companies. Maybe it matters to them because their livelihoods depend on it, so a minor tendency towards flaws developing over time affect them, whereas to your average consumer, the risk is worth it? I don't know. And I have no idea if, assuming this aging thing is true, it also applies to Blu-Ray and HDDVD discs.
Banshee
Rackhir said:
Has it been pointless? As I understand it, several HDDVD movies have added content online, that they're accessing through the port.....surveys, updated info, and in some cases, the ability to share a movie through linked players, or something like that. It's experimental, and supposedly has been well-received. So you might think it's useless, but *is* it?
Personally, the internet connectivity is something I haven't benefited from. My router is on the top floor, and my player is in the family room in my basement.....because it requires a cable, I haven't hooked it up online. I'm not going to turn around to buy a wireless connector for it. Now, if they had wireless internet capability built in, *that* would have been cool.
Rackhir said:
Blade Runner is *one* example of a major, cult-favourite type movie. Take a look at the list of Blu-Ray and HDDVD discs out there, and how many of them have addiitonal features that the regular DVDs don't. I've read a tonne of reviews on www.highdefdigest.com and there are actually very, very few. It costs money to produce those extra features. That has to be paid for. Yet they're trying to get the movies down in price, because people don't buy them at $40. I and several others that I know buy our discs through Amazon.com, have them shipped to the U.S., then drive across the border, pick them up, and bring them back home, because even with crossing at customs etc. it's still better than the ridiculous prices they charge for them in Canada.
Was it a complete flop? I haven't seen that. It's very useful. I can buy a disc once, have one HDDVD player, and still play the movie anywhere in the house. With a Blu-Ray, well, I need a player for my bedroom, one for my living room, and one for my family room....so that's $1200 worth of players. Plenty of people are in the same boat. Or, you can buy one disc that plays in both machines.Rackhir said:
With Blu-Ray being the standard, I know very few people willing to buy multiple machines......so we're back to being forced, as consumers, to choose whether to buy a Blue-Ray disc (let's say $30) that plays on one machine, or an SDVD (let's say $20) that plays on 3+ machines in the same household.
To many consumers, that's still a problem. In fact, the ability to have dual-format discs was a big reason *why* many people I know bought HDDVD players. Because for lots of people, getting a disc they can only play on one machine is a significantly inferior investment to one that they can use in all the rooms in the house, up at the cottage, in the player in the car, on their laptop, etc.
Rackhir said:
Even early on DVDs weren't that expensive. *More* expensive than they are now, sure.....but I still find plenty of SDVD's that they charge $30 for.
But you're right, over time, the costs will come down. Hopefully more than I think they will. Sony has a tendency to charge a lot for things we can get better and cheaper from other companies. Blu-Ray is not *just* Sony....but they are the leader, and that gives me some cause for concern. Hopefully I'm wrong about it.
Rackhir said:
I agree....and most tech sites agree the PS3 is the most future proof Blu-Ray player, which is why they're saying to *only* buy the PS3 for Blu-Ray players, as you're taking your chances with the others.
How many people bought $500-1000 players, and are going to be willing to get rid of them after a year, just to be able to play discs that came out after they bought their player? You use the HDMI and DVI example, as well as upscaling, but those are not core features. My understanding is that we're talking about "older" players not being able to play profile 2.0 discs....or at least get full features out of them.
When you bought your DVD player, and then new players came out with HDMI, it wasn't a matter of your DVD player not being able to play newer DVDs. With Blu-Ray players, my understanding is that they can't play them. At least that's what sites like CNET seem to say, which is why they say to stick with the PS3.
What I don't understand is......if the PS3 is updateable because it has an internet connection, and other players are not because they don't have an internet connection, can't they be updated other ways? With HDDVD players, you had the choice of either using the ethernet port to update your firmware, or downloading the firmware update to your computer, burning it to a DVD, sticking the DVD into the player and playing it, which would also update the firmware. Can't you do that with an older Blu-Ray player? Or are they not designed to work that way?
Rackhir said:
What I read was that their player was an older spec, it has troubles with newer discs, and Samsung had promised to fix this with firmware, but have never produced firmware that actually fixed the problem, and that was the reason for the lawsuit. I don't remember if I read that on CNET or EndGadget or somewhere else.
Are you saying that is incorrect?
Rackhir said:
Numbers based on marketing, correct? Sony ran a much better marketing campaign. And their timing of punting HDDVD with the Warner announcement was impeccable. Neither of those factors are technological superiority.
The PS3 was a definite advantage, and I think that in the long term, Microsoft's rush to get a next gen player on the market first will hurt them. It got them to the 10 million mark first, but they're taking PR blows right now, and that will only increase, because the PS3 is at this point priced at the same level, but also plays high def movies, whereas the XBox needs an addition. Many people who use their gaming system for gaming, and a DVD player for watching movies won't care. But among gamers, yeah, it looks like a mistake now, because the PS3 is catching up fast. Still doesn't have much software I like (in terms of exclusives), but oh well
Banshee
John Crichton
First Post
HDM is still niche market, so for the most part you are right. That said, this year is going to continue to be huge for HDTV sales. With one format out there it's just going to make it easier to pick up a PS3/BR player with that new purchase.Banshee16 said:
As for public perception of upscaling, the only people who have any idea about that or care are those who aren't willing to shell out the cash for an HD setup and I don't blame them. Most people have no idea what upscaling is in general. With lots of focus on HD on the way and how much the stores will be pushing it along with the 2009 HD broadcast change the market will only increase from this point on.
It will be slow, but as with VHS > DVD, it will take years to gain real market share. I recall buying $30 DVDs with my first player. I can already get BR movies at $20. Still, I see DVD being around for a while.
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