Taking Sides - HD-DVD or Blu-Ray?

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?

They're trying to drum up traffic while the iron's hot, but:

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/02/15/hd-dvd-deathwatch-were-making-it-official/

annnnnnnnnnd its all over
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSL1637974620080216

our long national nightmare is over.

Only slightly bizarre that the announcement was made before Universal or Paramount could have a chance to announce their switch over to Blu-Ray, but still ... ha!

Apparently, some people are still in denial (cf. comments).

Nfinity
@ Feb 15th 2008 4:23PM
The two formats will co-exist.. as there is ZERO reasons not too.. the whole ONE FORMAT is needed is a bunch of bullshit. Simply why:

PS3 and Xbox 360 (I won't even count Wii but that's 3 FORMATS).. all COMPLETELY different technologies, have unique (exclusive games on each). In order for a person to play all those games, they have to buy 2 $300-$400 game consoles. Publishers, took consumer and business sense approach and most of them publish in both formats.

This is a simple reality. Anyone who says this isn't the same as Blu-Ray and HD DVD scenario is obviously supporting lying.

Here simple pointers:

PS3 = Blu-Ray
Xbox 360 = HD DVD

Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, 2kSports, Sony Games, Microsoft Games = Warner, Universal, Paramount, Fox, Disney, Sony, Weinstein.

Some games are exclusives on Xbox 360 - Some games are exclusives on PS3 = Some movies are exclusive on HD DVD, Some movies are exclusive to Blu-Ray.

PS3 = 3.5 million units in the States
Xbox 360 = 10+ million units in the States

ratio about 3:1

Blu-ray (with PS3) = 3.7 million units in the States
HD DVD (with add-on) = 1+ million in the United States

ratio about 3:1

The difference? PS3 and Xbox 360 are everywhere... Blu-Ray and media says that HD DVD should die?

Completely illogical? I think so.

SO I assumed Blu-ray was the Beta of the '00s but now Toshiba is dropping all of its HD DVDs and Walmart are going to sell Blu-ray exclusively. What the hells? I dont even know what a blue-ray disc looks like.

http://www.hkfilm.net/mkfatal.jpg

A Blu-Ray disc does not look like a little red x.

http://www.tonis-records.de/images/7-Vinyl-CB_A45000_blue.jpg

it looks like a cd

or a single vinyl

about a month ago i decided to call all discs that look like CDs "CDs" but i haven't put it into practice yet

I've seen some of these "HD" downloads and they don't look very good. Similarly, the on demand HD stuff from cable doesn't look nearly as good as HD programs. Going to get a PS3 within the next couple months for sure.