News Chinese release 'HD-DVD Killer'

I like that the most about blu ray but from what I have heard about the players it has a long way to go, it is nice to see some more competition in the arena.

 

Good point but most DRM is in the file format and not in the medium on which it is stored.

 

No doubt it will become popular if it can perform the same and offer it at a cheaper price.

 

I just have one concern... questionable reliability.

 

If anything wouldn't this technology be a little more reliable, using the tried and true red laser format. anyone have a white paper or any numbers on this format I'm just curious what it's capacity and such is.

My only concern is the physical robustness of the format, if I read correctly blu-ray (or was it HD-DVD) halfed the thickness of the plastic protective layer, not to mention the greater storage density means that scratches will be that much worse (I'll be honest I don't try my cd's and dvd's all that well) Anyone know if they are still using a silver oxide substrate to store the information, those things have a tendency to be sun sensitive and oxidize over the course of 10-20 years, I imagine the effect would be worse with the next gen formats.

and finally will pc games ever come out fully on DVD?

 

A few games have been DVD-only, but for some reason, they're still released in 5 CD bundles despite the fact that the games cost more than a DVD drive. Not to mention they require dedicated graphics cards which cost much more than the price of a DVD drive.

Well, I meant the reliability of the technology if developed solely in China bu Chinese companies. Nobody wants any quality corners being cut in the production of discs that will hold irreplacable photos, just to save a few bucks.

BUT time will tell. If it works, then that's one small step for the free market and one giant leap for B-R & HD-DVD price cuts!

 

a lot of games in the uk are becomming DVD only... unless it is a small game or an addon.... i no a lot of games in the US come in both formats.. never really new why....

 

Not quite. Since it's easy, I'll point you to the relevant Wikipedia sections for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Both those formats have DRM built into the format itself, without which they could not have gained the backing of the studios.

 

I was thinking along the lines on DRM-ed downloads (iTunes etc.) but I learned something new today (I guess that means I can go to bed now eh) - Thanks

 

I think Blu-Ray will win. Capitalism. People don't care about prices if they get better product/service. The price is reasonable and it can hold lots compared to regular DVD's. My only concerned is, Disc's get scratched. UMD was very successful, only if they could team up with Sony and try to implement similar technology.

 

EVD should win, I don't want to go get a new drive for my PC to watch my videos (yep, my screen is almost bigger than the TV...) and "Blu-ray" has bad spelling, I f***ing hate that

 

Im sorry but what planet do you live on? People will go for price above anything else. That's why VHS beat Betamax despite being technologically inferior. UMDs are the exact opposite of sucessful, like Minidisks.

Otherwise the HD/BR players would have sold out long ago because it's a better product, yet, it hasnt because it's far too expensive and people are content with DVD.

 

I think UMD was great invention. If you make a bigger disc holder for the blu-rays, I think it will be very successful. The companies need to stop trying to make the dics hold more and start working on a way to store data without disc's getting scratched. May invent a new method. But for right now, UMD style is very nice.

 

now this could sound like a chronically stupid idea but bear with me on this.....ok so standard definition DVD video and audio require data to be trasnferred from where its stored at about 8Mb/s (of course it'll vary alot) ok so if we look at that in terms of MB/s it in theory only need 1MB/s transfer speed (call it 1.5MB/s to give us some head room). now thats nothing at all so why not use old flash memory (thats cheap to buy/manufacture and can easily sustain that kind of transfer rate) package it in something resembling a compact flash card (which can easily house 8GB of memory but whose to say it can't get physically bigger to allow for more storage), make the cards read only and well bob's your mother's brother! You have a storage system that should be cheap and you don't have to worry about scratching....i know it would be a DVD and next gen replacement (i have considered the fact that next gen content requires more bandwidth but by my calculations you still aren't in the reigons of the new expensive flash memory) but it solves all the problems, and its more compact than both of them.

feel free to tear my idea to pieces, but it was just an idea and i do realise that it could be more expensive. (but it can't get much worse than £25 for a pack of 5 writeable DVD-9's)

 

umd's have one terrible design flaw, the hole in the clear plastic. it means you have to keep the psp games in their boxes and cant just chuck them in a bag when you go out. at least minidiscs had a metal piece to protect the bit of the disc that had to be read

 

I read through the wikipedia explanation of it here , and its physically a DVD disc, but uses different codecs than MPEG-2. This might catch on very quick, it even says that successful copies were made using DVD-R's

 

But by that argument so was the minidisk. If it was a royalty free application then it might have worked but Sony will be Sony. Watching a video on a teeny tiny screens offers no appeal to me though. A screen has to be at least 7-12" before it's useful in that sense.

 

The problem is not in the UMD itself, nor the PSP's screen (I've watched a couple of movies on it, and while not stellar, it's ok if you are on a trip or something like that)...

It failed because despite what the content providers would love, consumers aren't going to pay twice for the same content in 2 different formats. If I already have the DVD and I want to watch it on my PSP, I'm going to rip it and re-encode it for my PSP, not buy an UMD. And of course, I'm not going to pay more nor even the same for an UMD movie that I can only watch on a PSP when I can simply get the DVD.

No consumer will give a damn about that being illegal nor think that's piracy...I bought the content or the license to the content so the way I watch it is no body's business. Sony failed to realise this with the PSP and that's why UMD movies don't sell.

 

Exactly. I've bought a few UMDs, (the first at full price to see what the image quality was like) but usually only when somewhere is selling them off extremely cheap (like around £5).

tbh, I've never had time to look for details on how to convert my dvds to PSP format - it's something I always meant to look into, but never seem to have the time to do.


@Aman
I've got Panasonic DVD-RAM discs which use a caddy to protect the disc when in use (similar to an oversized minidisc). The only downfall is you need a player capable of taking the caddy, and the extra cost of the caddy.

 

Off topic, but latest firmwares (from 2.71 upwards IIRC) allow you to watch .wmv files. If you don't like .wmv, get this:
http://www.pspvideo9.com/

It's free and converts PC video files to PSP compatible video. And pretty easy to use too... Of course, you have first to decode your DVDs to .avi, .mpg or something like that.