News Paramount moving to Blu-Ray too?

[CardJoe]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/01..._hd-dvd_too_/1

Rumours are that Paramount is set to move to the Blu-Ray format too, abandoning HD-DVD. Could the format wars be over already?

[cjoyce1980]

i hope not, as open formats are better value overall. down with blu ray and format licensing!!!!

[LeMaltor]

thank god tbh

[frontline]

Maybe my impulse buy of a blu-ray only drive will pay off

Now all we need are some decent releases to make it worth investing in.

[p3n]

Its not looking good for toshie this time around, although I did want to see SONY die an overpriced and fiery death ... ah well one format makes my AV upgrade plan alot less costly!

[Icy EyeG]

I like HD-DVD because of the lack of region restrictions and cheaper players. However, my support is just theoretical because here in Portugal you don't see any HD players for sale at a typical store (only PS3), and you see very few HD titles too. And for what I can see, most "Flat TVs" for sale around here lack HDCP...

I saw somewhere in the past months a news about the EU being asking the movie companies why they were supporting only one format. So, these news about WB and Paramount are rather surprising as I thought that, over time, all the companies would follow the example of WB (ie, supporting both formats).

So, for the time being DVD is the way to go for me (with upscaling, if possible).

[BioSniper]

Its the exact reason we bought a PS3 at the weekend, shame I have an HD-DVD drive that was a gift though.

[mmorgue]

Glad that at least the "VHS/Betamx" war V2.0 is ending early.

However, as far as the actual medium is concerned, I really don't see why we're being forced to use spinning pieces of easily damaged plastic -- we should be getting geared up for the next type of mass media storgage: SSD or ultra-cheap flash mem.

What with SSD starting to take off, flash memories increasing in size (8gb ~ 16gb+) and their respective prices coming down, I'd hope for a [disposable?] "film/movie" memory stick that you buy ala CD/DVD from the shops which contains your film. Plug it in to your player, either PC/dedicated unit/console, etc, and watch what's on it without the typical issues of big bulky spinning mechanisms, etc.

[DXR_13KE]

i think i will jump directly from dvd to holographic disks......

[Journeyer]

"i think i will jump directly from dvd to holographic disks......"

Quoted for truth.

[Veles]

Bit of a pipe dream that We won't ever be needing holographic disks for films, BD is already much bigger than it needs to be. It's debatable whether there's a point to BD/HD-DVD.

Looks like HD-DVD might be the loser after all, shame really, as cjoyce said, I'd rather have an open format. Odd really, all of Sony's other proprietary formats have failed pretty miserably, "Compact" flash, Betamax, Minidisk, UMD.

The success of BD is really down to PS3 really, even if the PS3 isn't king of the consoles right now, it definitely got a BD player into a lot of peoples homes compared to HD-DVD.

That, and the fact HD-DVD is annoying to type, they really could have thought of a better name, maybe just HDVD.

[mclean007]

Awesome. Two down, one to go - as soon as Universal gives up on HD-DVD we will have one format, which is the win. Until then, Heroes season 1 is HD-DVD only

Personally I'd rather HD-DVD had won due to the lack of region coding and cheaper hardware. However, as soon as one format wins, I expect a big increase in uptake which will drive down hardware prices. Soon there will be region free players too. Until then, looks like it's a PS3 for me!

[Journeyer]

"Bit of a pipe dream that We won't ever be needing holographic disks for films."

Possibly.
However, we did not really think, at that time, that DVDs would need replacing as a medium for distributing movies either. Who knows, maybe some ultra-high resolution movie format with x.x surround channels might warrant the 100Gb+ provided by holographic discs - or better yet; non-spinning holographic mediums. Though I was thinking of storage/backup solutions as I have been debating (rather vigorously) with myself whether or not to get a BD-writer. Burning multiple movies in various formats to data-DVDs is no longer fun. Combine that with the fact that a 500Gb HDD somehow fills up much quicker than the good old 500Mb ones in the old days. I curse you 10Mbit cable connection, you hear? Curse I say! (Not really though, I am quite infatuated with my cable connection )

[hix]

Man, I hope this is true. I already have a PS3 and I was so close from purchasing the HD-DVD add-on for the X360. I wanna see Transformers on my brand new full HD tv!

[mclean007]

Originally Posted by Veles

Bit of a pipe dream that We won't ever be needing holographic disks for films, BD is already much bigger than it needs to be. It's debatable whether there's a point to BD/HD-DVD.

Not if you've seen a film in 1080p on a well calibrated HDTV mate. Makes DVD look like a 56k stream of an old silent movie filmed with a camera phone with a cracked lens smeared in vaseline!*

Holographic disks would be needed to store a Full HD movie uncompressed - say 2 hours at 24fps = 3600*2*24 = 172,800 frames. At 24 bpp you're looking at 12MB per frame for 1080p, or 1TB for a 2 hour movie. Factor in increased bit depth (say 48 bpp) for HDR and you immediately double that. An 'ultimate' disk format would also need to cater for movies up to say 4 hours in length, so you can double it again. Add in support for UltraHD (or whatever they might choose to call 2160p) and you quadruple the number of pixels. Add in extra features and multiple angles (also in super high definition), sound tracks etc. and it's conceivable to imagine being able to fill 20TB. Now, obviously you'd use some sort of lossless compression on video and sound, and 2160p may be a bit ridiculous, but even so my extreme example is just an illustration that it is quite within the realms of possibility to imagine a format using more than the 50GB offered by Blu-Ray to good advantage.

One advantage of killing off HD-DVD will be that studios will really start to concentrate their resources on maximising the experience with BD, using the available storage to best advantage and coming up with clever new features to really squeeze the most out of the format. So long as there are two formats, you can bet that even those studios that are "exclusive" to one or the other aren't piling all their eggs in one basket (except maybe SonyBMG!) and are dedicating significant resource to ensuring their existing e.g. Blu-Ray titles could easily be ported to HD-DVD if that format were to win out.

(*may be a slight exaggeration)

[Journeyer]

"What Mclean007 said"

Absolutely.
And that's where the non-spinning (or Babylon-5-ish holographic crystal storage) comes into the picture... (pun somewhat intended).

[Icy EyeG]

Originally Posted by mclean007

Soon there will be region free players too.

I surely hope so... But I have the feeling that is going to be much more difficult to make them than when it was with DVD... As an Anime fan, I import a lot of stuff, so I don't know what is going to happen in the future...

[Bauul]

Out of interest, does anyone know how much space is taken up by the films they show at the cinema? I know Episode 2 was the first film to be only delivered digitally, so I'm presuming it's quite normal by now, so anyone know how much space is needed for one of them? Might be a good indication of eventual size requirements?

Edit: Turns out an 'average' digital cinema movie, with compression, is between 50Gb and 80Gb in size, so there's a requirement for more storage space right there. However, in the future, a system known as "D-Cinema" will utilise 4096 x 2160 resolution (4k resolution) and even 5k resolution (extra, extra widescreen), by combining multiple HD Projectors which display a seamless image. Uncompressed, this format averages around 20TB for a movie, so it looks like we really have got a long way to go before we have unused space in our portable disks.

More info on D-Cinema

[Veles]

Originally Posted by mclean007

Not if you've seen a film in 1080p on a well calibrated HDTV mate. Makes DVD look like a 56k stream of an old silent movie filmed with a camera phone with a cracked lens smeared in vaseline!*

I have and I was highly impressed. Worth all the money, confusion and aggravation? Not really IMO. It's not just confusion whether someone should buy BD or HD-DVD, but trying to find a TV that is actually good and doesn't cost you thousands of quid is impossible. I don't think anyone in their right mind is willing to pay thousands of pounds worth of equipment to get a tiny difference. Using DVDs for video was a huge leap, we went from the awful analogue VHS players that required you to fiddle with a knob if your tape was old so you didn't get stripes all over the screen to a digital player that allowed you to skip to any part of the story instantly and allowed you to view extras like "making ofs". That was a difference everyone could see and make use of, with HD there's a increase in picture quality and resolution, it's not that great really.

As for holo, there's a limit to what your eye can discern, anything higher than 1080p isn't really worth bothering with because we wouldn't really be able to tell the difference (1080p for many people is pointless, there's no point in 1080p for a screen less than 40", which is most screens sold), why would consumers bother going through the effort and confusion of another format upgrade so they can see an even more negligible difference than they got with HD? Holodisks just aren't viable for the video market, it's use is for data storage unless the video market gets a massive change like projectors being able to produce holographic films and stuff like that.

Your example is just a little extreme, that's getting into uber videophile territory, that kind of quality just isn't necessary or see-able by the majority of humans.

2160p? Unless you own your own cinema (full size) that kind of resolution is pointless. What kind of idiotic company is going to cater for less than 0.01% of the market? This kind of thing is for millionaires who would buy the disks special order from the studios. Even then, they'd probably just get several disks that rip to a hard drive, it would certainly be a lot cheaper.

[Journeyer]

Holographic movie projection is in the pipeline, and as such will eventually make its way onto the private consumer scene. This is just a question of time - and money obviously. However, being severly hardware addicted I for one would surely be willing to showel the necessary cash at the salesman in order to get one for myself.