Blu ray v HD-DVD?

mr-modern-life

mr-modern-life

So guys thoughts... which is the better format?

I watched Rocky 6 on Blu-Ray on a 1080i Philips TV through a PS3 and to me it seemed that when it is native (ie shot HD) the quaility was gob smacking. Otherwise it was impressive but HD-DVD seemed to be the more robust, consistant format (Serenity was outstanding - again XBOX360 playing HD-DVD drive)

So which is better and will either format win...

Anyone else?
 
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The public rarely accepts a 'dual format' future as you call it.

Pros:

HD-DVD: Cheap to manufacture, better technical implementation; looks great; inexpensive for consumers; little DRM to mangle things up. Pr0n.
Blu-Ray: Tie-in with Sony PS3

Cons:

HD-DVD: Few takers because Sony is a Hollywood bully.
Blu-Ray: Very expensive to manufacture; questionable technical implementation; Sony admitted they pushed the untested technology out the door just to compete with HD-DVD; questionable video quality; expensive for consumers; "sony proprietary format curse"; Orwellian DRM scheme; no software readers for movies on computers; no pr0n.

Right now, it's still too early to early in the format war. Hollywood is backing Sony for the simple reason they're one of the big six in Hollywood now since they bought MGM/UA and a few other film studios (lots of them minor). Hollywood sticks to their own (Spiderman films, anyone?).

I'll wait it out. I have no rush to buy the biggest, baddest, latest technology. Personally, I hope HD-DVD wins, but it looks like I'm going to be wrong. :(
 
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volswagn said:
... USENET and DVRs?
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vpturner said:
Because the bandwidth available for uncompressed audio and high-bitrate video isn't there yet. I've watched HD with my DVR for over two years now, and that quality cannot touch either HD-DVD or Blu-ray.
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I'm pretty sure that volswagn is referring to downloading and burning them (dvd-r, not dvr)...at least that's what I get from the USENET (NNTP - newsgroups) reference.

I do think that piracy will help determine what format wins as well...either by driving the consumer device end or by making DRM such an important piece of the puzzle to the content creator that it pushes toward the Sony side. With beta/vhs, piracy was something that could happen as easily on either platform, so wasn't as much as an issue...digital copies don't have generational loss, however, so piracy becomes a bigger issue and makes DRM more important.
 
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VPTurner said:
If they had all of the original film footage and scanned it in high resolution, then that would be fan freaking tastic.

Actually, it looks like they did. Woo hoo! Shows how out of touch I am. I haven't been following recent developments in the original series.

Now I wonder what HD format they'll use to release it...
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They have already committed to HD-DVD. I am familiar with the different television formats and their limitations. I should've mentioned that the Star Trek: TOS will be a full HD remastered product from the original camera negatives, not just the NTSC versions.

I have read that The Next Generation, DS9 and Voyager will most likely NOT be done in HD because all the special effects and final editing were done on NTSC video. I'm not even sure if the original camera negatives exist or are easy to get. They probably do, but going back and re-imaging all those effects in HD would be quite expensive I'd imagine. Might be worth doing for TNG, but probably not for DS9 or Voyager. :)
 
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indietalk said:
Usually those who keep the rights to themselves and do not license to third parties lose.
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Unless you're Apple, which somehow has managed to make the general public believe they are "thinking differently" when they spend twice the amount of money on hardware than they would otherwise, just because the product "looks cool." First thing Jobs did when he came back is shut the third parties down.

On the flipside, imagine how much software market share Apple could grab if they'd allow their OSX to run on regular old Intel/AMD machines? But noooooo... They want to be a HARDWARE company...
 
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knightly said:
I'm pretty sure that volswagn is referring to downloading and burning them (dvd-r, not dvr)...at least that's what I get from the USENET (NNTP - newsgroups) reference.
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Right. That's not to say I support "piracy" per se. I am a firm believer that the MPAA and RIAA are punishing some of their best customers. I buy probably 20-30 DVDs a year, plus maybe 3-4 boxed sets. Just because I download a movie or television show doesn't mean I would've bought it. If you put 10 different boxed sets of television shows on a rack and show them to me and say, 'you can have all these for free if you want them," chances are, I'll grab all 10. I might watch one or two of them immediately, and then put 8 in the media case for a later date. Chances are I'll not even get to six of those until years have gone by. Meanwhile, if you put those 10 different shows on the rack again and say, "they're $20 each," I'll probably buy three or four of them. That doesn't mean the extra six or seven are "lost sales" just because I didn't buy them. Not everything is a lost sale. That's what really bugs me about their argument.

Last year my Tivo missed taping an episode of 30 Rock. I went on a bittorrent site to snag it so I could watch it. It's one of my favorite shows, and I had every intention of purchasing the boxed set when it came out.

Turns out NBC/Universal sent a little letter to my local ISP saying they reserved the right to take legal action against me for "hosting" this file for others to share.

You think I'm going to give them my money now? No way in hell.

It's just bad business. The MPAA sees the RIAA and is scared to death. They see the future coming (digital distribution) and they're resisting -- at least on the consumer distribution front. They're catching up with theater digital distribution.

Also, lest you think I don't pay for stuff, I buy every piece of software I find I use regularly (Nero, Photoshop, Windows, WinRAR, Flash FXP, etc.).

I sleep fine at night.

As for DVR, no, I meant Digital Video Recorder. I watch my weekly HD shows off my cable company's HD DVR, and other than that, I have a media center PC that is connected to the television and stream HD stuff off the media server in the basement... No need to burn anything after you grab it from USENET.
 
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volswagn said:
It's just bad business. The MPAA sees the RIAA and is scared to death. They see the future coming (digital distribution) and they're resisting -- at least on the consumer distribution front.
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They're resisting because the internet as a whole threatens their decades-old ways of doing business and they have no idea how to embrace new technology. I don't think they have one single person on their payroll under 40. Technophobes. Don't get me wrong, I don't HATE the MPAA, but I think the RIAA, by suing their own customers, elderly people who don't know what the internet it, three year old children and DEAD PEOPLE is just wrong. I've read all the articles.

The internet is here to stay, whether they like it or not. They need to adapt or they will go the way of the dodo. Apple embraced it with iTunes and look at them now!!

I don't encourage piracy or theft at all. Everything I possess I have a receipt for. I don't steal. However, there's many others who don't consider downloading stealing.

Laws need to keep up with changing technology. Will that ever happen? No. That's the sad part. :no:
 
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volswagn said:
Unless you're Apple, which somehow has managed to make the general public believe they are "thinking differently" when they spend twice the amount of money on hardware than they would otherwise, just because the product "looks cool." First thing Jobs did when he came back is shut the third parties down.

On the flipside, imagine how much software market share Apple could grab if they'd allow their OSX to run on regular old Intel/AMD machines? But noooooo... They want to be a HARDWARE company...
Click to expand...

Well the ipod didn't take off until they made it Windows compatible, and they also now make dual-OS systems. But yeah, they don't license out their stuff. They tried that, there were some third-party apple computers a few years back.
 
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indietalk said:
But yeah, they don't license out their stuff. They tried that, there were some third-party apple computers a few years back.
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Right. There were at least one or two little manufacturers making some nice Apple-compatible hardware, and it sold well. Probably because it was cheaper than Apple's own hardware. Then Jobs came back and said, "uh uh. No more."
 
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Loud Orange Cat said:
They're resisting because the internet as a whole threatens their decades-old ways of doing business and they have no idea how to embrace new technology.
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I disagree. I think the reason they're holding back is simply... people will pay MORE for a physical object. No one is gonna pay $20 to download a movie from the internet. No one is gonna pay $60 for a special edition download they have to burn themselves. They want something tangible- physical. A "showpiece". Therefore, since they'd have to lower the prices of films downloaded, the profit margins would slip, and they'd have to stop spending 12million dollars to give Ben Affleck his trailer full of hookers.

The internet is here to stay, whether they like it or not. They need to adapt or they will go the way of the dodo. Apple embraced it with iTunes and look at them now!!
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For a music album with 12 songs, it'd actually be cheaper to just buy the physical thing- so the recording industry (in it's death throes as it is) would stand to gain a lot from micro-selling online- people think $.99/song is cheap, until they download the WHOLE album and realize they just paid a couple more bucks and don't even have a CD to show for it... whereas films can't exactly be sold "per scene", so having a Physical product would be very important for the "home market". Theatre and Cinemas are an EXPERIENCE, whereas the home-movie collection is just that- a COLLECTION.
What are other things people collect? How about comic books? People don't wanna download a comic book and print them! They want to go out and buy it- hold it, caress it... make love to it.

So that's my point. The industry is resisting the move to online because people pay more for tangible objects.
 
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Spatula said:
For a music album with 12 songs, it'd actually be cheaper to just buy the physical thing
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Sometimes, not always. Here's a good example:

I want to buy THIS music CD from Amazon.com. As you can see from the link, it's $41.99. (Ok, I like J-Pop)

From iTunes, it's $12.99.

Yes, this is an extreme example, but when I buy music, I buy it from Second Spin. Sure, I'm buying it used, but I've purchased a CD from them for $1.49. No kidding. I even got free shipping from them on a promo!

While I'm the kind of person who wants to buy physical media like CDs and DVDs, others like the convenience of online purchases. After all, we live in an instant-gratification society thanks to the invent of the internet. We've all become too complacent and "want it now." We've turned ourselves into such a lazy-ass society, we can't remember how to change the oil in our cars and pay for the convenience of having some undocumented alien do it for $2 an hour.

I'm sometimes embarrassed to consider myself a geek. It's not such a good thing sometimes.

//depressed :(
 
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Off Topic, but have to make a correction here...

volswagn said:
Right. There were at least one or two little manufacturers making some nice Apple-compatible hardware, and it sold well. Probably because it was cheaper than Apple's own hardware. Then Jobs came back and said, "uh uh. No more."
Click to expand...

In that era...I was an apple support technician. My professional experience at that time showed that the clones had so much promise that they simply failed miserable to live up to. Every clone we ever bought just died, hardware failures, not software incompatibilities. They were cheaper because they were made with cheap parts...the cheaper Power Computing machines we had at the publisher I worked for then died repeatedly and ended up costing more in repairs than buying apple hardware as we did for most other machines in the building. The motorola machines (their chip...machine should have been rock solid) were the same story. The clone manufacturers used the components from the PC competition and the lack of quality showed through in spades. I spent 50% of my support time inside those machines with the 15 year old macs plunking away quietly in the corner not bothering anyone.

The licensing for the clones was taken away because exactly what Steve Jobs said would happen did...the machines failed as their manufacturers were more concerned with competition than making a solid product. Apple's macos started to becoming more bloated as they had to support more hardware out of the box and it started looking bad as a result...the machines didn't have that much RAM or HD that they could even address (1Gb max RAM-technically 4Gb but you'd have needed 16 slots for RAM, 4Gb max HD/partition). Apple's image as a simple, elegant machine was tarnished. One of the reasons the iMac was created to look so simplistic and toyish was to bring the image of simplicity back. Gil Amelio missed the target audience thinking the geeks were the ones who wanted apples...fact was the target audience were non-computer people who just wanted a machine that could let them get on the web (new thing) and check e-mail (also new thing) without having to know how to do so.
 
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knightly said:
In that era...I was an apple support technician. My professional experience at that time showed that the clones had so much promise that they simply failed miserable to live up to. Every clone we ever bought just died, hardware failures, not software incompatibilities. They were cheaper because they were made with cheap parts...the cheaper Power Computing machines we had at the publisher I worked for then died repeatedly and ended up costing more in repairs than buying apple hardware as we did for most other machines in the building. The motorola machines (their chip...machine should have been rock solid) were the same story. The clone manufacturers used the components from the PC competition and the lack of quality showed through in spades. I spent 50% of my support time inside those machines with the 15 year old macs plunking away quietly in the corner not bothering anyone.

The licensing for the clones was taken away because exactly what Steve Jobs said would happen did...the machines failed as their manufacturers were more concerned with competition than making a solid product. Apple's macos started to becoming more bloated as they had to support more hardware out of the box and it started looking bad as a result...the machines didn't have that much RAM or HD that they could even address (1Gb max RAM-technically 4Gb but you'd have needed 16 slots for RAM, 4Gb max HD/partition). Apple's image as a simple, elegant machine was tarnished. One of the reasons the iMac was created to look so simplistic and toyish was to bring the image of simplicity back. Gil Amelio missed the target audience thinking the geeks were the ones who wanted apples...fact was the target audience were non-computer people who just wanted a machine that could let them get on the web (new thing) and check e-mail (also new thing) without having to know how to do so.
Click to expand...

I agree, it's like when Coke changed their formula to taste more like Pepsi. They quicky realized it was a horrible idea, but they recovered well, like Apple did.
 
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VPTurner said:
This is not accurate. I have one. It's made by Cyberlink. Intervideo is also up and coming. Granted, the drive it's running on has not yet been released (it's not Sony), but they exist and are coming soon to a store near you.
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It's about time they released a software player. HD-DVD released one the day their player was originally released, but Blu-Ray didn't immediately have one. I'm glad to see they've come to their senses. :lol:
 
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It looks like Blu-ray is starting to gain the upper hand with retailer and rental house exclusives even though HD DVD continues to get exclusive earlier releases (e.g. Star Trek OS - it will hit Blu-ray, just not initially like The Matrix trilogy). The Close Encounters exclusive to Blu-ray (for me, at least) is a big deal so I'm glad I chose Blu-ray for now. There is really nothing "must have" out there in HD-DVD yet that I don't already own on SD DVD.

http://www.blu-ray.com/

And I am really looking forward to this release. All five versions of Bladerunner:

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=352

Spielberg embracing Blu-ray? Maybe not. I read somewhere that Sony supposedly paid him $700 million to release it on Blu-ray

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/new...it_High-Def_With_Close_Encounters_Blu-ray/812

On a side note regarding quality differences between HD-DVD and Blu-ray, I've watched close to twenty movies on Blu-ray now, and they all look and sound amazing. I'd be real curious what titles are being referenced where quality is supposedly crap on Blu-ray. The Fifth Element was an exception because it was poorly mastered. The remastered version hit the shelves this month. I agree, that film transfer was crap. It wasn't the format to blame, though.
 
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