Taking Sides - HD-DVD or Blu-Ray?

...though I care about music more.

I am considering a PS3 for Gran Turismo and Blu-Ray, but I'm still not sure. I figure $$$ upfront for the first kind of player and something $ later if blu-ray loses.

Another problem with HD-DVD & Blu-Ray is that there still aren't really many very good movies out on either format. And of course, in most cases, what is on there is a lot more expensive than the standard DVD versions. Lots of people didn't switch from VHS to DVD until the prices on DVDs got more than competitive too. For instance, the 28 Days Later DVD is $9.99 US on Amazon right now, while the Blu-Ray disc is $27.95 - and this is a movie that supposedly looks no different in either format. Why would somebody in their right mind buy the blu-ray disc even if they had a player?

Would somebody in their right mind buy that movie in the first place...?

would somebody in their right mind buy a movie?

no way, movies are expensive! they cost tens of millions of dollars!

The de laurentiis family bought Dune as a gift for all of us

They're both basically doomed, unless Warner takes a side soon, and then the other side would be immediately dead.

I don't care about Warner. I do care about Criterion. I just want them to start putting out HD movies - damn it. I don't care which format - I will buy either player I need at that point, which will hopefully come soon (but I doubt it).

Warner chooses Blu-Ray. HD-DVD is pretty much dead.

ya that's somethin.

And Toshiba cancelled (or at least postpones) their CES press conference? God, this is really bad for HD-DVD. I really wish I hadn't stupidly bought a player a couple months ago when they were doing their warehouse-is-on-fire sales. At least I've only bought a couple discs beyond the freebies.

if you got one for cheap you will probably be able to scoop up tons of good movies when the format dies. i mean, even if you didn't get one for cheap. the point is, you'll probably get your money's worth.

and some studios are still HD-DVD only, so it's not going to be obsolete for a while

Suppose HD-DVD dies. And a Blu-ray costs just as much as the DVD equivalent. Will there still be a reason for consumers to go Blu-ray?

Unless computers start making all their built-in optical disc drives Blu-ray *and* DVD compatible, and/or offer cheap portable Blu-ray readers/burners, Blu-ray is going to have to eat money for a long time.

...

I mean I still see many kids on buses use CD walkmans. It's not as if iPods have really "won" yet either, ya know?

^^^Wut

they're saying apple might start putting blu-ray in macs as early as this season.

Suppose HD-DVD dies. And a Blu-ray costs just as much as the DVD equivalent. Will there still be a reason for consumers to go Blu-ray?

Blu-Ray is HD. Regular DVDs are not.

Yeah, I was thinking of pawning off my HD-DVD player, but that was just crazy talk off the initial shock of the announcement. I'd only do it if I was a gamer and wanted a PS3 anyway, which I sort of don't.

i'm glad we could talk you down.

Haha

I do have to say this will probably curb any future HD-DVD buying for now.

lol @ warner brothers rescuing the playstation 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=friS4OOcdgQ

^^^ lol

Even I have to admire the bloodshed today with both Best Buy and Netflix effectively telling HD-DVD to fuck itself.

I'm glad this all seems to be coming to an end, hopefully people will start flocking to Blu-Ray and the prices will eventually drop to my affordable range.

I'm actually a little surprised that the clearly (or so I'm told by film geeks and tech-heads) superior format actually one this battle. I still remember my parents' dismay at the Betamax fiasco.

Blu-Ray is not the clearly superior format.

so they're still going to be regionally coded? Fuck THEM

Fuck them ALL

fuck it anyway -- dvd is fine as is. regional coding is a big pain in the arse, about half of my dvds are from outside of my region, and i have a six sense-type feeling that blu-rays will be harder to hack than my venerable five-year-old samsung.

Blu-Ray is not the clearly superior format.

I'll confess to not knowing a whole lot about either format as far as specs go, but every person I know whose opinion I really trust when it comes to these types of things swears that Blu-Ray is much, much preferred to HD.

it's preferred but not better

Fuck them ALL

^^^this

eh downloads will win in the end

not really

for the foreseeable future "hd" downloads are so compressed that they're not gonna look much different than dvd.

i.e. downloads will win NOW cause DVD on an HDTV looks fvckin fantastic

downloads wont win until delivery/bandwidth problems are sorted - but bluray is just a stopgap

it's all just a stopgap until we get hd chips implanted in our penises.

i.e. downloads will win NOW cause DVD on an HDTV looks fvckin fantastic

-- Tracer Hand, Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:13 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

this actually depends. some dvds i have look really good on my hdtv, some look like total shit. all depends on how they're encoded.

and hi-def looks much better, generally. depends on whether people will want to show off their fancy sets or not.

There was just a big article on movie downloads crippling bandwidth for a lot of ISPs, so I'm guessing some of the smaller guys are going to start putting limits on how much can be downloaded.

that's another thing for sure. everyone's putting a cap in users' asses nowadays.

i mean if the number of ppl in any given neighbourhood who rent a movie in any given night downloaded a 5gb movie (approx size of a compressed hd flick)... it'd be disastrous. it'd be the hd 9/11.

yah all that stuff is pretty fascinating ip multicast local isp throttling googles mysterious data centers and dark fiber etc what will happen nobody knows???

but the fact that the roll out of paid movie dls and bluray are happening simultaneously doesnt bode well for the discs

Bandwidth is not an issue, less than 10 years ago It would take me an hour to download one album at 56kpbs dial-up speed, 5 years ago I could download a 700 mb DivX via ADSL in a couple of hours, I can now download a 4gb HD h.264 file in an hour via ADSL2+. Five years down the line there will be VDSL, or fibre optical cable, or some other method which will allow me to download 40Gb in an hour.

It's only going to get cheaper and cheaper to transmit data over time.

and yet isps are making it more and more expensive. standard plan over cable here = 20gb dl cap. that's like 4 movies/

while its obv true that bandwidth increases over time if everyone started dling movie right now it wouldnt matter if you had fiber or whatever - because the bottleneck is actually at where your isp connects to the larger internet - the only reason people can get good dl speeds now is cause everyone isnt using their max bandwidth at the same time.

which isnt to say there arent solutions - like say serving the videos over each isps own network where there is plenty of bandwidth - apple or whoever would just needs a data center hooked up to each isp - or the isps could build their own and rent them out

im sure theres tons other solutions too - obv im no expert on the topic - but it seems as demand grows theyll figure this out - theres too much money to be made not to

i'd personally be as happy as a clam if i could get dece quality hd downloads over the intertron. still i have the feeling they'll fuck it up somehow, the same way they've fucked up any other legit digital distribution system.

Exactly, I think the point is not everyone is going to start downloading movies all at once, it will be gradual, and the more people want it, when they start getting HD tellys, when people buy a "media centre" connected to the internet, gradually the infrastructure will grow to support it.

it is gonna be a hueg shift tho - have you heard the stats on bittorent? its like 50% - 75% of all internet traffic. and most people have no idea what it even is.

I thought most blu-rays weren't region coded, though they can be. There's just three regions too, right?

I'm getting leery about buying blu-rays because i know i'll have to upgrade everything again when the 4k/8k TVs become a thing.

Kinda of a random question here but: recently got a basic Samsung SE-506 ODD for my MacMini, partially because I just needed a new one, but also because it handles Blu-Ray. Now I know Mac and Blu-Ray aren't always happy with each other but I figured what the heck, especially since I am between TVs for the present. Anyway, the drive works perfectly with CDs and DVDs just fine, so clearly the Mac recognizes it -- I'm running El Capitan as well FWIW. However, it's not recognizing any Blu-Rays, and I did download a trial version of this as a test:

http://www.macblurayplayer.com/features.htm

As you can see from this:

http://www.macblurayplayer.com/how-to-play-bluray-on-mac-os-x-10-11-el-capitan.htm

The program is supposed to recognize a disc via step 3b, for instance, and recognizes a DVD as mentioned. But again, no BD disc appears either in the program menu or on the desktop. So is it simply best to assume that while SE-506 handles other discs just fine, it's just not recognizing Blu Rays at all and is simply defective? Answers on a postcard etc (and thanks in advance!).

Can't believe it's been 10 years since this format war. Difference between DVD and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD was so minor compared to VHS vs. DVD. HDTV's and players/Xboxes/Playstations were super expensive so until very recently, I'd never had a decent sized HDTV and a Blu-Ray player. Sorta going nuts with the compulsive buying. Fuck Barnes & Noble and their amazing 50% off Criterion sale.

My Panasonic bluray player started getting jittery when playing discs after just three weeks. Does it need an update? Surely a bluray player shouldn't need updates just to play discs?

I don't know the specifics, but I believe part of the blu-ray system runs on Java, and I remember instances where players had to be firmware updated to play certain discs (Avatar, among others)

but the issue you're describing sounds more like perhaps a faulty unit that should be returned for repair/switch?