HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray

[Shin Johnpv]

A cheaper player doesn't mean shit when HD-DVD is inferior, technology wise, to Blu-ray.

it's a very rare thing when the most technologically advance format wins, look at VHS vs Beta as a prime example

I jus't don't think this war is going to be won by the rich videophiles that can buy 1,800 $ players

if HD-DVD manages to get into more homes than Blu-ray right off the bat then the studios are going to go where the sales are, which is a better market to sell to 1,000 people buying movies or 10 people buying movies

it's no different than the consoles, the GC and Xbox were far superior to the PS2 and yet the studios went to the PS2 because it was in the most homes

I think the only thing that can save Blu-Ray is the PS3, but with no news on the PS3 at CES i'm begining to think that it's not going to show up untill very late 2006 or very early 2007 (didn't sony originally claim a spring 2006 release, I don't think that's going to happen)

the win is going to go to who ever captures the mainstream first

either way I think this format war is going to hurt sales in general

I can tell you personally I'm not buying ANY dedicated player untill a victor is chosen and my dvd purchases are going to be cut down to minimal only must have titles, because that just means less I'll have to rebuy later, and I think thats going to be most peoples attitude towards it

Also, pron chose Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray wins.

this is true blu-ray does have porn which always helps a medium sell

I just don't know if it's enough to give it a victory over HD-DVD

I think price is going to have a huge factor in, because cheaper is what's going to sell to the masses first, and where the majority of the people buying movies are is where the studios are going to go

[Andy]

The thing is, the masses aren't going to be buying either of them for probably a year, two, or even longer, other than the PlayStation 3. That's the whole reason why porn went with Blu-Ray.

The only people who are going to be buying either format early on are AV/technology/electronics enthusiasts, and I don't think a lot of them are going to side with the format that has less content, far less support from electronics and computer manufacturers, and inferior technology. For an enthusiast, price is not their primary concern. If it were, they wouldn't be called enthusiasts.

[mollipen]

it's a very rare thing when the most technologically advance format wins, look at VHS vs Beta as a prime example

The problem is, while this keeps being thrown out over and over, the analogy doesn't always work, and the world of home media is a very different place now.

Plus, VHS vs. Beta and Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD are two totally different situations. The original came at a time when there was NO form of home video, and VHS won because the company behind Beta - Sony - tried far too hard to control the format.

I jus't don't think this war is going to be won by the rich videophiles that can buy 1,800 $ players

No - it's going to be won by the PS3. Early adoption is very important, however, and no videophile in their right mind is going to choose HD-DVD over Blu-ray. That's why HD-DVD's initial lower price doesn't mean anything. The people who the price difference will matter to aren't going to be the ones buying machines for the first few years, and the people who are going to be buying machines will be buying Blu-ray.

if HD-DVD manages to get into more homes than Blu-ray right off the bat..

But it has no chance of doing this. Even if HD-DVD somehow sold even with Blu-ray in the first year of the formats - and I don't see that happening - once the PS3 hits, that will no longer matter.

Just a question - when did you first get DVD? I didn't get a machine right off of the bat, but I followed it hardcore, and a friend of mine at the time got a machine. For at least the first year, and that's being generous, DVD was only for the hardcore people. The people who ended up cementing the popularity of DVD - Joe Average - were nowhere near DVD at that point. You had a bunch of home theater types purchasing DVD, and a few wackos purchasing Divx. I wouldn't be surprised if things worked out that exact same way, just replacing DVD with Blu-ray and Divx with HD-DVD.

HD-DVD can't just "get into more homes than Blu-ray" in the first few years - it would have to totally crush Blu-ray, and somehow stop the PS3 from including Blu-ray playback.

it's no different than the consoles, the GC and Xbox were far superior to the PS2 and yet the studios went to the PS2 because it was in the most homes

It is totally different, because each console has a large variety of different content. Movies don't work the same way.

I think the only thing that can save Blu-Ray is the PS3, but with no news on the PS3 at CES i'm begining to think that it's not going to show up untill very late 2006 or very early 2007 (didn't sony originally claim a spring 2006 release, I don't think that's going to happen)

I really think you haven't been paying attention to the formats if you think Blu-ray needs to be saved. HD-DVD has no PS3 (no, an add-on for the 360 does not count), and it's going to bite them in the ass. Every single person who buys a PS3 suddenly becomes a potential Blu-ray customer. Anybody wanting a next-gen video format but feeling a bit worried about taking the plunge can buy a PS3, and worse come to worse, have a great game machine. Both formats are going to need a good hook to get the average customer to jump into HD video, and the PS3 provides that for Blu-ray. People who can't justify to themselves buying a dedicated deck simply to try out HD-DVD or Blu-ray will be able to far more easily justify getting a PS3 - not to mention that it is a much more "consumer friendly" piece of hardware.

I can tell you personally I'm not buying ANY dedicated player untill a victor is chosen and my dvd purchases are going to be cut down to minimal only must have titles, because that just means less I'll have to rebuy later, and I think thats going to be most peoples attitude towards it

EXACTLY. You and people like you aren't going to decide the early days of the war between the formats - videophiles are. And they won't be picking HD-DVD.

this is true blu-ray does have porn which always helps a medium sell

I just don't know if it's enough to give it a victory over HD-DVD

I think price is going to have a huge factor in, because cheaper is what's going to sell to the masses first, and where the majority of the people buying movies are is where the studios are going to go

Okay, again... the masses are not going to be buying these things for the first few years. Plain and simple. The people who are going to be buying them are the people who (a) have spent the money to get a nice HDTV, and (b) care about the video quality difference between DVD and an HD media for their HDTVs. The first few years of sales will be to the enthusiest.

Those are the types of people that DO care about the difference in technology, are knowledgable about it, and there are some very large differences between Blu-ray and HD-DVD that are going to matter greatly in the end experience.

You take the two formats, and they start at relatively the same point - same codec support, same basic core ideas. Let's then even move past the possible disc size difference between the two formats.

First, Blu-ray offers almost twice the data transfer rate per second that HD-DVD does. That bandwidth is going to be very important when you start to look at having to handle HD video, audio, and extras. Blu-ray, thanks to the higher bandwidth, is going to be able to deal with video and audio compressed at far better rates than HD-DVD will.

Then, look at the fact that HD-DVD's standard max resolution is 1080i, while Blu-ray is 1080p. HD-DVD is supposed to be a next-gen format, and its max is 1080i?

When you start looking at things like that, any home theater person in their right mind wouldn't pick HD-DVD over Blu-ray. HD-DVD is a hobbled together technology, made to be "good enough" while worrying most about the cost of doing things. Blu-ray was made with the technology being more important than the initial costs. Why are people going to spend thousands of dollars on a nice HDTV, spend hundreds of dollars on a nice audio set-up, and then pick the lesser technology to use on all of that equipment?

[Schlep]

I'm a HT enthusiast, and I would buy HD-DVD if I had spare cash, and then wait and see what happens with Bluray. That's what I did with DVD; bought one for $500 or $600 when Dallas was a test market. $1k-1800 is too much to gamble for me.

[Scourge]

Another interesting article at DVDfile.com about video constraint.

The debate is over and the results are not good. Image constraint will be mandatory in hardware and optional in software. In other words, all players must be capable of recognizing and acting upon a flag in the digital data stream called Image Constraint Token. The studios will have the option of setting this flag to either the on state or the off state. When on, the player would reduce the resolution of high-definition images by 50% in both dimensions. The 1080 format measures 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high; the reduced resolution would be 960 pixels wide by 540 pixels high. It isn’t clear how that would be done, but I suspect the players would simply throw away every other pixel in each direction, substituting the previous pixel for the discarded pixel. If I’m correct, the video would still appear to monitors as 1080, but the resolution would be substantially reduced:

Conventional DVD: 720 by 480 pixels; 345,600 total pixels
Full resolution 1080i/p: 1920 by 1080; 2,073,600 total pixels
Constrained 1080i/p: 960 by 540; 518,400 total pixels

So constrained HD will have one quarter the resolution of full resolution HD. But one promise has been kept; the industry always maintained that, if imposed, the constrained output would look better than conventional DVD. And as you can observe, constrained HD will have 50% higher resolution (50% more pixels) than conventional DVD.

[Shin Johnpv]

Just a question - when did you first get DVD? I didn't get a machine right off of the bat, but I followed it hardcore, and a friend of mine at the time got a machine. For at least the first year, and that's being generous, DVD was only for the hardcore people. The people who ended up cementing the popularity of DVD - Joe Average - were nowhere near DVD at that point. You had a bunch of home theater types purchasing DVD, and a few wackos purchasing Divx. I wouldn't be surprised if things worked out that exact same way, just replacing DVD with Blu-ray and Divx with HD-DVD.

I don't have time to reply to everything you typed but I'll reply to this since it's the quickest one to

I got into DVDs right from the start, DVD players and drives hit in 96/97 in the middle of 97 I bought a new PC with a DVD drive and DVD decoder card, the whole system including a 19 inch monitor cost between $1,700 and $2,000, come december of 98 I bought my parents a stand alone panasonic DVD player for either 200 or 250 for christmas

it'd didn't take long for DVD players to match the cost of high end VCRs, personally I put the fast spread of dvd drives in the PC market (every middle to high end PC shipped with a DVD once they came out), players became affordable very quickly (I'd say with in 18 months of launch), and that DVD movies cost about the same as VHS when they launched give or take 5 maybe 10 dollars depending on where you were buying them at, as the main reasons why DVDs took off and replaced VHS so quickly

[Diff-chan]

shidoshi is making one critical error in judgement here. He is failing to realize that it is the masses who are buying HDTVs as we speak. People are a lot more techsavvy now than they were in 1997.

I really dont care which technology catches on and actually Id rather if neither do. The DRM in both is unbelievable and will cripple the formats and turn paying customers into tools of the MPAA. We already have a situation where Sony thinks they can hack into our computers and do whatever the fuck they want because we bought their music CD, I shudder to think of what they will be doing when they (or anyone else) have full control.

[Yoshi]

We already have a situation where Sony thinks they can hack into our computers and do whatever the fuck they want because we bought their music CD, I shudder to think of what they will be doing when they (or anyone else) have full control.

IBTN. This is why I still shutter when I think that our options for gaming are Microsoft and Sony. Both of them have the maniacal take-over-the-world drive, which scares me. Everything in the next decade is going to head to integration, and seeing one company succeed in integrating your DVD player with your refrigerator is a somewhat scary scenario. The only deciding factor between MS and Sony in that space is that at least MS is an American company.

[mollipen]

shidoshi is making one critical error in judgement here. He is failing to realize that it is the masses who are buying HDTVs as we speak. People are a lot more techsavvy now than they were in 1997.

Oh no, I know that. That's why in my post, I said that the early adopters would be the people who have an HDTV and want to switch over to all HD content as quick as possible. You read stories about people who buy an HDTV and then think they are watching HD content but aren't. As well, I think you have to put aside some some amount of those people who are buying one simply because they need a new TV and are getting an HDTV just because it's the cool new thing.

I think even if the masses are already buying HDTVs in any amount, the early days of HD-DVD and Blu-ray will still be the home theater people. Sure, I could be totally wrong about that. But I think nearly every new entertainment tech launch that we've seen has worked that way - the early adopters are the hardcore, and then the masses come in later.

Another interesting article at DVDfile.com about video constraint.

For anybody who doesn't bother to read the link, this is specifically talking about the signal output via analog, such as via a component cable or whatnot. I'm not saying that this is a good this, but we've known about this for a while, and Scourge's post isn't about some new bit of nastiness that has just cropped up.

[gamevet]

I don't have time to reply to everything you typed but I'll reply to this since it's the quickest one to

I got into DVDs right from the start, DVD players and drives hit in 96/97 in the middle of 97 I bought a new PC with a DVD drive and DVD decoder card, the whole system including a 19 inch monitor cost between $1,700 and $2,000, come december of 98 I bought my parents a stand alone panasonic DVD player for either 200 or 250 for christmas

Are you sure about that?

DVD players were not priced under $300 until 1999.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD