Blu-Ray and HD DVD

Soooo... I guess Blu-Ray is now the winner of the HD optical disc war. If Toshiba are throwing in the towel and the various studios and companies going Blu-Ray exclusive its pretty much the end for HD DVD.

Anybody going to start buying HD discs now that this has been decded?

Even if I had the money at the moment, I don't think I would. By the time the price on the standalone players, recorder drives, and blank media become reasonable, digital downloads will probably become the more attractive option.

At the very least, I don't see any way that Blu-Ray will have the same run that DVD had. I just don't think it's possible.

UK prices but a PS3 is £300, a writer is about £160, write once media is about £8 and rewritable media is about £9. Its still fairly expensive but not extravagantly expensive like it was a few or so ago.

If you want the highest quality picture and audio then I guess you'd have to still get a disc of some kind. The HD downloads are compressed more than HD discs and also aren't 1080. I don't see people regularly sucking down 30+ GB just to watch 1 film at 1080p with less artifacts.

Unless you have a shiny new HD TV there isn't really that much point to buying Blu-Ray unless you want to be "futureproof"

I've got a PS3 and the only Blu-Ray movie I've got is Casino Royale and that was because it came with my PS3.

I was recently at the local Sony outlet store and they had a bunch of BDP-S300 players for $250 (refurb). I almost pulled the trigger, but I thought about how often I use my DVD player. With the large amount of HD premiums I get from DirecTV, I almost never buy or rent DVDs.

I think once the prices of players hits $100-150 it will be tempting enough to buy one.


I actually watched a movie on Vudu this weekend in HD. I was expecting it to be not much better than the SD version, but I was pleasantly surprised. The movie wasn't what I would expect from HD DVD or Blu-Ray, but it was reasonably close to what I expect from DirecTV. It's pretty astonishing such quality can be streamed from the internet so rapidly. It will only get better.

True, but that's not what I said. I don't care what they were, I care what they are, and the price-per-GB on Blu-Ray media is ridiculous when compared to DVDs or even hard drives. I know the price will come down, as it did with CDs and DVDs before, but it's going to take a while, IMO.


You're correct that the quality on the discs is as good as you can get, and downloads are still not up to snuff. That's not what I was saying, though. It just seems to me that by the time digital downloads become the new medium, Blu-Ray won't have had nearly the run that DVD did. If you look at how well Apple and Netflix (and even Amazon) are doing it now, even with their drawbacks, it just looks more like a cloud over the future of physical media to me than a current competitor.


And why would you do that anyway? If you don't have an HDTV you can go out and get a DVD player for about $25.

The proliferation of HDTVs is what this is all really about anyway. When DVD came out, it could replace every single VCR. Blu-Ray cannot do the same thing to DVD players. Regardless of my predictions on downloadable content, I still maintain that Blu-Ray has no chance of seeing the same success that DVD did.

I'm not sure how you think I'm arguing with you. I'll paraphrase it.


Prices are dropping rapidly. A writer was over £500 a year ago.


If you want highest quality then buy a HD disc.


Unless you have a HDTV it is pointless to buy a HD player.

Yeah. I tried streaming a few clips on my Apple TV with the latest firmware and the quality is pretty good considering its all going over the internet.

Didn't mean to offend. It just seems to me that you are arguing with me, because you keep giving reasons why the things I'm saying aren't true right now, when my arguments against Blu-Ray are all for things that are three or more years down the road.

(by the way, I would have said all these things for HD-DVD, too)


Well, you did say that someone might want to "futureproof" themselves by getting a Blu-Ray player before an HDTV. That's what I was responding to.

Maybe, maybe not. I was holding out until the format war was decided one way or the other. Truth be told, the one thing that I was holding out for was the release of Rock Band in the UK. Since my "rock friends" all have PS3s, then that's what I'll have to get to play online with them.

Yep, it's got nothing to do with HD video. My 32" LCD only does 720p/1080i anyway...

I don't find digital downloads all that appealing currently for everything. For TV shows, and some movies, sure. But discs will continue to be my primary source of movies, even if it's just a rental. Both for cost and quality issues.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/13347/ has some good image comparisons between the Apple TV, HD Cable, DVD and Blu-ray.

I also don't see digital downloads becoming this mass market thing as quickly as some people think. They all require some sort of separate box, none that really sell in the big box stores yet. They require home networking setups of some kind, thus raising the tech barrier a bit. They require a decent broadband connection to get the movie playing in a reasonable amount of time. And for the connection, if they go wireless, they have to worry about all the fun interference issues cropping up with the 2.4ghz gear. Even beyond that, consumers then have to worry about their provider implementing network technologies that slow down the service, ala Comcast.

There are a lot of hurdles to jump to get digital downloads into the mass market.



I can agree with this, as I see Blu-ray living alongside DVD far longer then DVD lived beside VHS. But I just don't see digital downloads coming up and really providing any strong competition to either disc based format in the US for a long time.

I was saying that those would be the reasons why somebody would still want a disc. I wasn't disagreeing with you about how digital downloads will be a big thing for content delivery. People will still want discs for various reasons.


I should have put the :P smiley next to that since I was being sarcastic.

I've been buying a lot of Blu-Ray movies. I wish I knew exactly how many, but there things like the Harry Potter Box Set, Bladerunner, Planet Earth, and the Ocean's 11, 12, and 13 set in there. I was surprised at the difference in quality, now it is usually what we purchase and watch.

I've been pondering this very same issue. The main reason not to buy Blu-ray now is that there just isn't all that much content you might want to buy.

There are some other annoying reasons not to buy Blu-ray today. There's something called Blu-Ray Live (Profile 2.0) which requires an Ethernet jack. Today, only the PS3 has the potential to support this. All the other players don't have it. Conversely, the PS3 doesn't support "bitstream" audio output (see Engadget HD discussion), which means that you can't play discs with DTS-HD audio encoding, since the PS3 isn't smart enough to pipe it through the HDMI jack to your state of the bleeding art receiver.

Grumble.

Since my current DVD player is only "progressive" and has no HDMI output, I'm actually tempted to get the discount blowout on the HD-DVD players (Amazon link). $129 gets you a player that will upscale existing DVDs, and you get five free HD discs (from a total library of just over 500 and that's it, ever). That's enough to have some "HD pr0n" to show off my system, yet improve the quality of the regular DVDs that have content I might actually want to watch.

Never mind that we hardly ever watch DVDs. Instead, we tend to snag movies in HD with the Tivo. Still, I've been increasingly annoyed that TV-aired movies tend to make all kinds of cuts for time and to bleep out obscenities. It's almost comic how bad the dubbing has been done. That's incentive to get the movies on real DVDs. Hmm...

I stopped watching movies on TV ages ago for exactly that reason. If I'm inclined enough to watch a movie, I'm disinclined enough to want to have naughty words dubbed out and scenes cut.

Yeah. Lots of people have been complaining about this already. They bought the first gen Blu-Ray players and got told that they're stuck with 1.0 support only since they just don't have the hardware necessary for 1.1 and 2.0.


I'd expect that the PS3 would be eventually upgraded to do this.

Not possible with the Silicon Image HDMI 1.3 chipset in the PS3. It would have to be a newer one to support bitstreaming audio.

Edit: Woot! Finally reached "Old Hand"

I only do Blu-Ray because I have a PS3. And the only reason I have that is because I won it. The quality of films (even the Casino Royale that came free with the PS3) just isn't enough to make me go 'wow'

I mean, I don't actually see the quality problem with VCRs - yes, I know they degrade, but I am perfectly happy with the resolution etc. I like HD screens, but anything 'i' flickers too much and gives me a headache, so it would have to be 'p' anyway. And 1080p just isn't sufficiently better to make it worth paying anything for.

You wouldn't think I was always an early adopter of tech would you? First iPods, now HD TV - sheesh, I must be turning into a grumpy old man!

I just finally got around to watching the Southpark Tourette's episode. If they can do that on mainstream television, there's no reason they need to be bleeping out the occasional dirty word from random 80's films.

Ouch. Okay. That does suck. PS3.1?

One of my best friends is very much like this too. He has to have his refresh rates really high and is highly sensitive to frame rates when playing games compared to me. Yet, low res doesn't bother him that much.

This was a few years ago now before he went to the Optician one day and they found his eyesight to be quite far out. Now he has glasses he appreciates high res a lot more, though he is still a bit more sensitive to refresh than me.

Anyway, when was the last time you had your eyes checked?

Really? I mean, I've only watched a few things on VCRs in the last...I don't know how many years...but when I have they look horrible. And I'm talking really nice VCRs here, like SVHS and stuff. Compared to your average DVD they look atrocious to me.

The tough sell is high-def discs to the average consumer. Upscaling DVD players make regular DVDs look pretty damn good if you're not too picky.

Myopia - Built in anti aliasing for the real world

I'm going really off topic here, and I don't know how many people watch Dexter, but the network premiere of the show did a fairly decent job of toning down the swears. I was pretty surprised. There are two characters on the show whose dialog is half swearing, and they handled it pretty well. They also left a surprising amount of the gore in...

nah - I agree that there is a difference, but it is not one of enjoyment quality (as I rate it) but then I prefer the sound from my old tape deck to CDs. VCR quality is more than enough for me to utterly enjoy a film without worrying about things - seriously, the blurring and pixel lag at cinemas annoys me more.

I can't stand watching regular (upscaled) DVD's anymore, and will pretty much only watch HD DVD's. For me the quality can definitely improve the experience of watching the movie.

I'm just waiting for someone to bring out a laptop-sized slot-loading Blu-Ray player so I can put it into my MediaPC

You can already get one. The Panasonic UJ-225. Its pretty expensive though because of the laptop component premium and the fact its a writer as well. I can't find anybody that stocks it in the UK either.

HOW MUCH

Even with a weak US$ I can't justify that ;(

I've splurged and bought a LG GGW-H20L drive. It is a combo drive that does Blu-ray writing and HD-DVD reading + all the usual DVD/CD writing. It seems to work pretty well and took about 30 minutes to burn 9GB of data onto a rewritable Blu-ray 2x disc.

If there any good deals going for HD-DVD movies then I might pick some up. Only would be able to watch them on my PC though.

I was looking at a similar drive for my Media Center PC. The LG GGC-H20L drops the Blu-Ray buring portion, and isn't priced too badly ($299, although it was $229 just a little bit ago). One nice thing is the BD Profiles are all a matter of software (such as PowerDVD), and not the drive. I don't know about the audio support though.

There is a rumor that the Xbox 360 HD DVD add on will drop to $49 in the next week. I'll definitely pick up one of them to attach to my Media Center PC. Since I already have over 100 HD DVD's a small drive is a small investment to ensure I will be able to watch them for years to come.

I've got the Planet Earth Blu-ray boxed set now. Looks great.

Okay *THAT* might possibly be worth a blu-ray player.

What's the US price?

I've generally seen it around $60-70, but it looks like its only $55 at Amazon currently. The Discovery Store just blew out their HD DVD versions for $30.

The BBC version is considered the better of the two. The difference is the BBC version is voiced by David Attenborough, vs. the Discovery Channel version was voiced by Sigourney Weaver, and is 5-6 minutes shorter per episode. Also BBC is 1080p vs. 1080i for the Discovery version.

I have it on HD DVD (same encode as the Blu-Ray) and the picture on this is fantastic! Very cool series!

Indeed. It was one of the few things I've bought while waiting for the format war to be decided. It also brings up a nice thing about the end of the war, the companies like the BBC who were producing releases on both formats can stop worrying about the lowest common denominator and produce some nice discs. Dual releases were usually encoded to fit the smaller HD DVD discs, and also usually stripped features to lower themselves to the Blu-Ray Profile 1.0 stuff.

That totally pushes me over the edge on that one. I hated her voiceover.

Okay, maybe "hated" is too strong a word.

Yeah when Paramount originally released on both formats a year ago they would use different encodes for each format. All of Warner Brothers (who does distribute BBC titles) titles to date use the same encode for both versions. WB did however do separate special features for both profile 1.0 and HD DVD.

I'm personally waiting for a good profile 2.0 player before adding BD to my collection.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft are now discontinuing the HD-DVD addon.

Xbox HD DVD drive dropped to A$49 today (maybe yesterday) in Australia. At one online website it was even possible to get one for A$38 delivered with a coupon. They all sold very quickly.

I even bought myself a Toshiba XE1 player since it's a great upscaler for SD DVDs (with it's Reon chip) and I didn't have a regular SD DVD player. I'd been sitting on the fence but since it was about the same price as an Oppo regular DVD player, I figured I couldn't really lose.

Perhaps this is Toshiba's new "marketing" tactic? I don't think so but it would be nice if they hadn't totally given up. I preferred HD-DVD just for it's region free... All other things being reasonably equal IMO

One of the theories as to why Toshiba gave up totally is that it was part of another deal where Sony sold most of their Cell/RSX fabs to Toshiba.

Except that the deal for the fab was in the works well before Warner's announcement and the downfall of HD-DVD, and Toshiba has been working with Sony and IBM on the Cell for a long time.

It's funny that so many people keep coming up with wild speculation on why the format died, when for a solid year, Blu-ray outsold HD-DVD discs worldwide. Toshiba also probably looked at the Japanese sales numbers, where both movies and recordable media was heavily in favor of Blu-ray for a long time. But nah, it couldn't be that simple, there has to be "foul play" somewhere! Warner's announcement was likely due to their own sales numbers, as they released movies on both formats at the same time. When they did announce, it was simply the momentum needed to swing it in favor of one over the other.

I did find this cool.

Ahh. I didn't read too much about it. Just heard that was one of the rumours.

It's pretty obvious why the format died -- "Blue Ray" is a *much* catchier (and easier to remember and say) name than "H-D-D-V-D" (has "committee" written all over it.. duh!).

Cheers

I had the exact opposite thought. Compare Beta vs VHS. DVD. CD. LP. MP3.

Honestly, I feel like an idiot saying "BluRay". I predict that in a year's time, people will be using a less trademark-y term for them.

As did I. Blu-Ray sounds ridiculous, and I assumed that the familiar association of HD + DVD would appeal to the average consumer.


I predict that they'll be calling it "HDDVD"

But Blu-Ray says exactly what it is (although they missed the 'e' off as an Americanism!)

Them thar new fangled moving picture discs?

Doubt it. Sony won't let that happen and besides, if you did start calling it "HD DVD" how are you going to differentiate it from the real HD DVD?

I reckon people will be calling them 'blueray', 'blurry' or, for old farts: 'new DVDs'...

I don't think it sounds ridiculous. Compared to say..... "Chicken McMuffin".
Never overestimate the intelligence of several million people.


I've noticed that normal plebs are quite happy to do the marketing department work by genericising brands:
* coke
* hoover
* google
* walkman (back then anyhow)
* jacuzzi
* frisbee
* jeep
* superglue
* ipod

Happily the brand owners hate this.

Apparently this backfired a bit, with people buying HD-DVD discs thinking their normal DVD player would play them. Every store I've see that carries HD-DVD or Blu-ray has big disclaimers above the area stating you must have a new HD-DVD or Blu-ray player to play the discs now, but most didn't when they first started appearing. What also likely didn't help the confusion was the mix of DVD/HD-DVD hybrids in with the normal HD-DVDs. So some would play on a DVD player, while others wouldn't.

I don't see the name changing anytime soon. The Blu-ray association has spent a ton of money on brand recognition and the associated branding on players, movies, and so on. Imagine trying to change the name of the XBox 360 now, or the iPhone. And both of those have been known about for less time then Blu-ray.

I'm not saying that the official name will change, just popular usage. I'm trying to imagine Mom (or really anyone) saying to me, "I'm going to the Blockbuster to rent a BluRay disc," the same way she might say, "I'm going to the Blockbuster to rent a DVD."

Maybe the change will just be in avoiding referring to them directly — "I'm going to the Blockbuster to rent a movie" — only using the term BluRay when distinguishing it from a different format. I wouldn't be surprised if people just kept calling them DVDs otherwise.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I believe that the term BluRay will not become part of commonplace parlance in the way that DVD has.

I could see people using the term "BD". Like Bitt's example: "I'm going to Blockbuster to rent a BD."

Of course even less consumers have heard the term BD in reference to a Blu-Ray Disc.

Don't you mean a Digital Versatile Disc ?

Until and unless BluRay players cost $50, DVD will continue to have the lion's share of the market, and I wouldn't expect much from Blockbuster. NetFlix, I presume, will get into it without any trouble.

In the end, I'm predicting that downloads will win, just like they did with audio, even though they're nowhere near the quality of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.

Huh. I wonder what people actually say in this situation.

"I'm going to Blockbuster to rent a DVD"

or

"I'm going to Blockbuster to rent a movie"

...and back in time which of the following would you have said?

"I'm going to Blockbuster to rent a Betamax movie."

or

"I'm going to Blockbuster to rent a VHS movie."

or

"I'm going to Blockbuster to rent a movie."

I don't foresee any need to change the name (officially or "just on the street"), it's just the underlying technology.

Most people will be aware of the formats that they can play in their household so a "DVD/HD-DVD/BLURAY" disc is just a movie.

(imo!)

People still "go rent a video" don't they?

When they were new it was "Wanna come and watch a DVD?" - now it's "watch a film" or "watch a video"

Syllables?

Dee Vee Dee
Vid E O

I don't think it's syllables. DVD is rather unwieldly on the tongue, though.