News The format war marches on...

Personally I think dual format players will become the norm, like the 'war' between CD-R and C+R, in which no-one has won, because most users don't actually know there is a difference between the two, lol.

 

Or like the high-def audio war...SACD...DVD-Audio....where no one actually seemed to care.

 

In reality SACD won. Just no one buys it.

They killed each other off and one has just managed to survive.
Terrible forcing this stuff on us when previous generation gear is still good.

 

There's a difference?

 

SACD was far superior to DVD-A IIRC. But the music industry is very different to the film industry. Not many people want to pay more for an improvement which is very little (many people don't care about musical quality). Whereas people can see a vast improvement from HD tech.

 

Where would we be in the world if two years ago both of these idiots would have sat down and come up with a standard? How many TV's, players and movies would have already been sold? While competition is good, we are in desperate need of an independent agency to establish a standard.

 

What's that stuff good for again?

... I mean really ... by the time the DVD arrived, basically everyone could see the point (was there a format war back then, for the R-discs?).

-btb-

 

Absolutely the truth. Unfortunately, in a free-market system where every corp or group of corps can come up with an idea, pump money into it, then sell it, they tend to have differing ideas and more often than not are a direct competitor of the other. But this is all obvious, I know.

I just hope this thing is over soon, so I can watch something in higher def than current DVD on my HDTV that isn't television!

 

i just go on what format has more disk space and BD has more alot more

DVD 4.7gb/9gb
HD 15gb/30gb / 51gb tripple layer but not work with some older drives (firmware update maybe)
BD 25gb/50gb / 75gb (it may be bigger) tripple layer same as above

as long as the wining/loseing war is on it push BD drives down when thay get to less then £100 i probly get one (£300-£350 for an 4x one still alot cheaper then when DVD-/+ drives came out, the reader only BD + dvd burner combo is £150)

 

blu ray is also supposed to support more layers then HD-DVD

I don't know how many layers it will support, but their suggesting at least 8

 

I'm on the fence on this one, but leaning (albeit very slightly) towards BD.

 

I don't really care, as long as the winner rolls out with products that are both cheap and abundant (yes, I'm hoping for a perfect, happily ever after world)!

 

It's all very good having a larger disc and everything, but is it really necessary? There hasn't been a single Blu-Ray release which has actually made use of it's extra space over HD DVD. You only need look at Hot Fuzz with an amazing picture and audio and 10 hours of additional features on one disc (compressed in MPEG2 I might add, if that was in AVC or VC-1 4X as much could be fit on there - or it could be in 1080i) to wonder what's the point considering HD DVD's can be made on pretty the same equipment that makes DVD's that are in supermarket bargain bins at £2.99.
The new codecs mean that a film is pretty much topping out at 22GBish... that's topping out, many films are well below 20GB, Blu-Ray's as well as HD DVD's. Blu-Ray's includes the PCM audio which is nice and fills up the disc, but lossless DDTrueHD is just as good... in fact 98% of people's home cinema setup's wouldn't allow the listener to distinguish any differences between a good DDPlus/DTSHD/PCM/DDTHD track.
Most new DVD authoring equipment is actually capable of making HD DVD's without modification, that means if HD DVD was suddenly at the distribution levels DVD is at currently the costs of manufacture will be the same.

As for the multiple layers... adding 1 more layer to blu-ray would mean another substantial out-lay for equipment upgrades, increase risks of faults by a third, decrease yields (which are already much much lower than HD DVD/DVD), cut out the PS3 owner as a potential customer and as I have said spark of utter pointlessness considering just how much can be fit on a 50GB disc. Why do all that to make tri, or the even more costly quad layer, when they can just throw another disc in the box.... I'm sure that customers aren't going to be put out swapping discs over after watching a single disc for 13 hours.
More layers will never happen..... look how much DVD+RWDL discs still cost... more layers more trouble and money.
For PC use Blu-Ray is too little too late... is anyone going to backup a 1.5 terabyte Hard drive to 30 ultra expensive DL Blu-Ray discs?? Cheap USB hard drives will take over that backup duty and then holographic discs will take over after that. Plus DVD large and cheap enough for burning out a movie... even in 1080p.

jesus I've gone on for ages...

Bottom line my friend... size isn't everything.

 

I have my money on HD-DVD, for two major reasons. To the average person HD-DVD is much more recognizable. It's a DVD, in HD (even the elderly often know what HD means)! Secondly, these days Wal-Mart determines what's in and what's out. WM has basically put itself in HD-DVD's corner due to the cheaper production costs of the players. They have the ability to buy millions of players and sell them at a slight loss, in order to build the customer base for the discs.

As for blockbuster backing Blu-Ray, a very large percentage of people renting BR movies from them will be the same people who are renting games for their PS3. Right now, I don't know a single person with a stand alone BR player.

 

I'd like to think that Hollywood has the control over this war; they have the power to either go with Blu-Ray or HD-DVD (or both) to sell their Movies to retailers.

Also, I know that USA is a huge consumer market and Wall-mart dominates. But Target is International and is going to spray ads and the like over the world + it doesn't mean that other companies can't do what Wall-mart does (which imo is appalling)

You also have the companies, Samsung, Sony and Panasonic are the biggest names in Home Theatre and the HD corner, all of them support Blu-Ray and all have their own players... So I think I can safely say that it's only a matter of time when either one of these companies decide to drop their price that all of the Blu-Ray players will drop in price.

Here in Australia you can either buy a Blu-Ray player for $1000 or buy a PS3 for the same price... Why would you buy a player?

IMO I think that Blu-Ray has the lead, only slightly though... It only takes a drop in price to win

 

Samsung and LG have both announced dual-format players. I don't care even slightly which format 'wins' as long as I have a player that can handle both and the prices are similar.

 

remember though, it was the pr0n industry that won the VHS vs Betamax battle

Personally id like to see BD win because 50-200gb backup discs really do appeal to me

 

I don't see either Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD in German video-rentals.
So my guess is: same as with VHS vs. Beatmax vs. Video2000... the first one to flood videorentals with P0rn is going to win.

On the PC side... both are too small really, Harddrives have gotten too cheap.
The downside however: if games stop fitting on DVD (as is already happening) we've got to find SOME way of transporting content into our PC's.
(And no, not everybody can or will stream >5GB from the internet)

Xir

 

I hope BD wins the format war. It seems to be a more expandable format (much like 650MB/700MB/850MB CDs). It would be better from a computer-user standpoint. As a movie watcher i don't care much, but it's nice to have one common format.

I think HD DVD will win, though. People today aren't willing to pay for future-proofing. They just want the cheapest crap on the market. (They still complain when the DVD player they got with their box of cereals break, though...)

The enthusiast market is just to small for BD to survive at the moment.


Another outcome is that dual format players will be more popular, and people stop to care about the formats (like on DVD+/-).

The VHS/Betamax war was a bit different, as the media was physically different. This made dual-format players much harder to make. Here it was the cheapest, and not the best format that won.