The format war is over...Warner goes BluRay exclusive!

[anti-matter]

Well this is good news to those hold outs like me. I didn't have a chance to read through for any contradictions ...just responding to the OP...

...now if they could end the Plasma v. LCD TV thing.

 

[USS KG5]

anti-matter said:
...now if they could end the Plasma v. LCD TV thing.

Well fortunately that is not really an issue -its not like you cannot watch something on an LCD you can on a plasma or vice versa, and whatever happens they are not going to start making 17" plasma monitors for PCs, so LCD is not going anywhere.

If any technology is likely to disappear it is plasma, but even then the companies who support plasma screens generally manufacture those and not LCDs, so plasma will not disappear in the short term either.

 

[Irishman]

Russ said:

jeff lebowski said:

Russ said:
I'll definitely be picking up a Blu-ray player, no question there. The problem is I refuse to buy anything except for one that is Profile 2.0.

I din't see 2.0 as being a draw to the format.

The HD video/audio is the draw.

If you want interactivity and such.

Go on the internet.

The draw for ME is interactivity. Video/Audio is very important, but not something that isn't available elsewhere.

If I don't see the same sort of commitment to interactivity from the BDA as I did from the HD DVD group, I'm not jumping in. I'll settle for digital distribution or something.

Unlike most people, I don't buy my movies just because I liked it in the theater. Special features are VERY important to me.

It's your right to hold out for that. For me, 6X the video detail and more lifelike color, and more accurate, lossless soundtracks ARE more than enough to tip me in Blu-Ray's direction. Plus, great upscaling for DVDs always helps. (I've seen upscaling on X-Men on a 1st gen Panasonic BDP played back on a 50" 1080p plasma that was phenomenal). Not even using a Reon chip. I can't imagine how good those Reon-enabled models will display SD-DVDs!

 

[Irishman]

USS KG5 said:

anti-matter said:
...now if they could end the Plasma v. LCD TV thing.

Well fortunately that is not really an issue -its not like you cannot watch something on an LCD you can on a plasma or vice versa, and whatever happens they are not going to start making 17" plasma monitors for PCs, so LCD is not going anywhere.

If any technology is likely to disappear it is plasma, but even then the companies who support plasma screens generally manufacture those and not LCDs, so plasma will not disappear in the short term either.

I can't wait to see what Pioneer unveils that they've been showing in the BBC video (9 mm thick! 60+ " scren size! The video display looked vibrant and full of that high contrast picture we've come to expect from Pioneer)

 

[Irishman]

Bob The Skutter said:
Well I'm glad I didn't go and order the HD DVD add on for the xbox and buy a load of HD DVDs over christmas now.

Here's a funny slap in the face for MS. They were planning to come out with an XBox rev with the HD-DVD player built in! Wonder if they'll still do it.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

Irishman said:

Bob The Skutter said:
Well I'm glad I didn't go and order the HD DVD add on for the xbox and buy a load of HD DVDs over christmas now.

Here's a funny slap in the face for MS. They were planning to come out with an XBox rev with the HD-DVD player built in! Wonder if they'll still do it.

The rumours about that have been floating around since the Xbox 360 launched, and apparently they shot it down again yesterday.

 

[scotthm]

USS KG5 said:
So I'm not touching them with a bargepole until they come down to sane money.

A lot of people seem to worry about the cost of the player, yet ignore the cost of the discs.

I like to buy the DVDs I want to watch, and don't really do rentals. I've got a $300 DVD player and well over $10,000 worth of DVDs in my living room. The cost of the discs is way more important to me than the cost of the player is, and until I can regularly get Blu-ray movies for $12-$16 I plan on sticking with DVD.

---------------

 

[Daedalus12]

USS KG5 said:
OK, first off...

1. Portable video is extremely popular, the current range of ipods almost all support it as do most digital media players. They are great - kill loads of time on planes etc. There is a significant market for lower-res portable video.

2. Hi-def streamed HDF content for big TVs does have a future on the Internet, for certain. The costs are so much lower for the manufacturer (no big factories making discs, no distribution, no big heated shops and store rooms). The problem is that the average joe's bandwidth is currently too low to make it practical. This will change over the next decade however.

SOME people will, the success of music downloading of all kinds indicates that people over-estimate the power of tangible possession.

1. The low-res portable video market will not and was never meant to replace the home theater market. It has been slightly detrimental to TV ratings but it hasn't stopped people from rushing out to buy DVDs. Consumers simply will not stop buying Lost Season 3 DVD/Blu-Ray bcause they have a poorer quality copy of it on their portables. Watching movies/TV is a much more social activity than listening to music plus the quality gap in video is much larger. In the case of compressed music it's very hard to distinguish vorbis or aac of 190 kbps versus the original PCM on the CD. Most of auditory artifacts are in fact very subtle and you wouldn't hear it unless you know exactly what to listen for.

2. I agree that online high-def will have a role in the home entertainment market. What I disagree with is that download will displace physical medium soon (within 20 years or so).

No doubt legal music downloading has become more prevalent however it has only put a small dent into the much larger CD market. I certainly don't see that dying either within 5 years.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I can see online distribution becoming routine within *10* years, but not 5.

That being said, I am so fuckin' glad that the format war is (effectively) over. As soon as all my HD-DVDs - what little of them I have - come out in BluRay (especially Transformers and TOS season 1), then it's bye-bye for my HD-DVD player!

 

[USS KG5]

Daedalus12 said:
1. The low-res portable video market will not and was never meant to replace the home theater market. It has been slightly detrimental to TV ratings but it hasn't stopped people from rushing out to buy DVDs.

I did not say it did - though for some people (for example those who spend a clot of time travelling) the low-res copy will be the only copy they ever buy.

So I guess we are not talking portables replacing the home cinema but other travelling activities - like going to sleep, reading or gawping at the stewardess.

Consumers simply will not stop buying Lost Season 3 DVD/Blu-Ray bcause they have a poorer quality copy of it on their portables. Watching movies/TV is a much more social activity than listening to music plus the quality gap in video is much larger.

I'm not sure how much more social it is but yes, I have a DVD res copy of Rihanna's Umbrella video as well as my 320x240 one

In the case of compressed music it's very hard to distinguish vorbis or aac of 190 kbps versus the original PCM on the CD. Most of auditory artifacts are in fact very subtle and you wouldn't hear it unless you know exactly what to listen for.

Well I find it is not as much the artefacting on compressed music that bugs as the loss of definition in the bass/treble but thats another debate - the newer codecs at higher bit rates are borderline indistinguishable and of course we have things like FLAC.

2. I agree that online high-def will have a role in the home entertainment market. What I disagree with is that download will displace physical medium soon (within 20 years or so).

I think within 10 years it will be the primary medium, there is too much of a push behind it to take 20 years to take over, the world moves faster than that these days.

No doubt legal music downloading has become more prevalent however it has only put a small dent into the much larger CD market. I certainly don't see that dying either within 5 years.

Well it depends which bit of the CD market you are talking about. CD sales are plummeting, largely not because of legal downloads I agree (it is more the final death of the back catalogue market) but it is going throguh the floor compared to its mid-nineties peak.

Also in the UK the CD single format is basically dead and download sales control the singles chart. The question really is whether albums switch to downloads, or whether the album dies altogether.

 

[Noname Given]

MIB said:
Looks like my move to hold off on going HD/Blue Ray for a while panned out to be a good one. However I don't believe Blue Ray will be replacing DVD as fast as DVD replaced VHS. People have only finished that conversion just a few years ago. I don't think they'd be wanting to do it again. I sure as hell don't. Especially what with all the anime I have on DVD at this point.

You do realize all Blu-Ray players still play normal DVDs - thus if there's something you have that you don't like enough to re-buy in Blu-Ray HD format; it'll still play for you as is.

But as someone who went Blu-Ray LAST January (he I wanted something that took full advantage of my new, expenive HDTV set (73" Mutsubishi DLP) - I'm happy for this turn of events.

Also, as an IT professional who's had to suffer through Microsoft's dominayion of the industry and deal with their piss-poor code over the years; it's nice to see Bill Gates loose a battle in the marketplace.

 

[ACE]

scotthm said:
So I'm not touching them with a bargepole until they come down to sane money. A lot of people seem to worry about the cost of the player, yet ignore the cost of the discs.

I like to buy the DVDs I want to watch, and don't really do rentals. I've got a $300 DVD player and well over $10,000 worth of DVDs in my living room. The cost of the discs is way more important to me than the cost of the player is, and until I can regularly get Blu-ray movies for $12-$16 I plan on sticking with DVD.

---------------

I don't like to pay full retail for anything.

I have nearly 100 Blu-ray discs in my collection. Except for a select few, I paid on average $9.99 to $13.99 for most of them - thanks to sales and BOGOs (Buy One Get One free) at places like Fry's and amazon.com.

I am also a Reward Zone member at Best Buy, and receive coupons for substantial discounts of DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

The deals are out there.

 

[USS KG5]

Noname Given said:
Also, as an IT professional who's had to suffer through Microsoft's dominayion of the industry and deal with their piss-poor code over the years; it's nice to see Bill Gates loose a battle in the marketplace.

Sad thing is he hasn't - Bill backed a horse in a race he knew was going to be won by the horse he has put a lot more money on - downloaded HD content.

MS are positioning themselves for this market. The cock up he has made is that MS spent so much time pacifying the big corporations with Vista he neglected to do anything for the consumer.

It can still be turned around though - remember they were VERY late for the Internet revolution and they won that battle.

I suspect there will be an upsurge in Vista's popularity when SP1 comes out as well.

 

[Daedalus12]

Well I find it is not as much the artefacting on compressed music that bugs as the loss of definition in the bass/treble but thats another debate - the newer codecs at higher bit rates are borderline indistinguishable and of course we have things like FLAC.

Loss of definition would be the cause of those artifacts like distortion in the bass or treble sounds and yes the newer versions of lossy codecs like vorbis and AAC are great plus older ones like musepack is still imo the champ at producing transparent files at a smaller size (around 185 kbps).

I think within 10 years it will be the primary medium, there is too much of a push behind it to take 20 years to take over, the world moves faster than that these days.

The only one pushing it really hard is microsoft at the moment. The internet infrastructure will not catch up that fast but I think this would be an endless argument between us because neither one of us is going to convince the other. We won't know for sure until years down the road don't we.

Well it depends which bit of the CD market you are talking about. CD sales are plummeting, largely not because of legal downloads I agree (it is more the final death of the back catalogue market) but it is going throguh the floor compared to its mid-nineties peak. Also in the UK the CD single format is basically dead and download sales control the singles chart. The question really is whether albums switch to downloads, or whether the album dies altogether.

Personally for me unless online stores start to sell music in lossless compression codecs then I would still be buying CDs until it's gets discarded into the bin of dead formats.

 

[USS KG5]

Daedalus12 said:
The only one pushing it really hard is microsoft at the moment. The internet infrastructure will not catch up that fast but I think this would be an endless argument between us because neither one of us is going to convince the other. We won't know for sure until years down the road don't we.

Indeed - the next decade will be an interesting time for this forum I think!

Personally for me unless online stores start to sell music in lossless compression codecs then I would still be buying CDs until it's gets discarded into the bin of dead formats.

Would it not be nice if in additon to lossless downloads they switched to HIGHER than CD quality, so when getting a download you actually got a file of equivalent to DVD-Audio or SACD quality? Certainly a nice benefit for hi-fi enthusiasts.

 

[Flavius]

Was it on this site - or some other place where I read it today? Don't recall, but for one there are scientific studies out there proving that people have a hard time telling if there are looking at 480 or 720p.

Secondly, the first generation of HDTV owners who payed a LOT of money for 720p TV's might be genuinely disappointed when they pop in one of those news discs. Well, you can always *think* it looks great.

You need a native 1080p capable TV to really benefit from this. I wouldn't be surprised if this takes another couple years even after this news today. The industry, though, can speed things up a bit by lowering the prize significantly.

 

[Ronald Held]

Perhaps that is true, but how far in the future?

 

[USS KG5]

Flavius said:
Was it on this site - or some other place where I read it today? Don't recall, but for one there are scientific studies out there proving that people have a hard time telling if there are looking at 480 or 720p.

If you are talking about an upscaled well rendered DVD quality picture on an HDTV I am not even a bit surprised. The jump in quality from DVD to Blu-Ray is not as stellar as from VHS to DVD. Like with CDs DVD set a gold standard for quality that is tough to beat.

Unlike with CDs there is a big market there for the taking with Blu-Ray discs that was never there for SACD and DVD-Audio (though the former still does OK as a niche classical format).

Will Blu-Ray ever be as big as DVD? No, I don't think it will.

Secondly, the first generation of HDTV owners who payed a LOT of money for 720p TV's might be genuinely disappointed when they pop in one of those news discs. Well, you can always *think* it looks great.

If you think it looks great then it does.

You need a native 1080p capable TV to really benefit from this. I wouldn't be surprised if this takes another couple years even after this news today. The industry, though, can speed things up a bit by lowering the prize significantly.

The industry will price things as high as they can and still sell them. The price of players will come down not because the industry wants it to but because the supply will go up and competition from cheap Chinese brands will drive the players down.

As for TVs themselves, eventually they will stop making 720p LCD panels and exclusively make 1080p ones, but they sure as hell wont do that when they can charge a premium for 1080p disproportionate to the cost of making the higher-res panel.

They are out to make cash - they want you to buy your DVD collection again and they wont start playing fair until we all dont. Then the prices will come down to stimulate demand, until then the early adopters will get a sore ass as always.

 

[Flavius]

The HD-DVD camp has been selling off players + discs recently for an apple and a half to gain ground in the format war. If the industry wants to make a serious dent into the DVD sales and sell Blue-Ray - that's what they have to do.

 

[MIB]

Noname Given said:

MIB said:
Looks like my move to hold off on going HD/Blue Ray for a while panned out to be a good one. However I don't believe Blue Ray will be replacing DVD as fast as DVD replaced VHS. People have only finished that conversion just a few years ago. I don't think they'd be wanting to do it again. I sure as hell don't. Especially what with all the anime I have on DVD at this point.

You do realize all Blu-Ray players still play normal DVDs - thus if there's something you have that you don't like enough to re-buy in Blu-Ray HD format; it'll still play for you as is.

Actually, I didn't know that. That's awesome.