HD DVD vs Blue Ray

What's you opinion the these formats?

It's soon approaching the time for me to upgrade my DVD player and TV but I'm not fully convinced either way which next gen player to get.

I know if I get a HDTV then I'm ok, but having 2 new DVD formats is stupid.

Personally I'm tempted to stick with HD-DVD because average Joe on the street will associate HD-DVD easier with movies than Blue Ray, ergo, HD-DVD will win be the overall winner. HD-DVD, HD-TV - all seems the logical in store advertising that average shopper Joe will recognise.

I know Blue Ray discs can hold more info, but obviously HD-DVD discs can hold HD movies, so thats a moot point for me.

What are your thoughts on the movie formats?

From what I've read, Blu-Ray players are alot more expensive to produce, and the discs themselves cost more to mass-produce then HD-DVD player/discs, so my vote does to HD-DVD, as this sort of crap is expensive enough as is to begin with until the majority of people decide on which of the two will be the winner by means of adoption.

Either way, it wont affect me though as I dont own an HDTV, and that PC game developers tend to prefer publishing a game on as many damned CDs as possible, when DVDs have been out for ages now.

Having two competing formats at this point in time can only be good for the consumer. The copy protection systems in particular will be be forced to consider consumer inconvenience as the formats battle it out over the next 12 - 24 months.

BlueRay I know has a degraded signal path for Television and Monitors that do not provide signed secure decryption on their digital inputs.

I love analog so the details just made me feel ill.

I would wait as long as possible before making a commitment on this stuff. The rights management stuff is potentially something that will really tick off a large amount of consumers, and could be enough to tip the scales either way.

Once people (the masses) start to realize the stuff being shoved down our throats I think (hope) there will be a bit of a backlash against it. It's absolutely insane the type of things they are trying to do with these formats in the name of "protecting" their digital rights. Consumers I hope will have the final say.

Sony will be trying extra hard to push blue Ray this time. They don't want to lose again, like they did with beta, which was a superior format the VHS.

Dunno about my throat but my jaw dropped pretty low watching some high def quicktime on a 17" LCD.

They're both trying to address a non-issue. The kind of people who care at this point are the same kind of people who thought LaserDisc was a good idea. No offense to anyone intended.

Not necesarily, since there's HDTV and HDTV.

Most of the older generation HDTV's won't be compatible with BluRay OR HD-DVD. You need both 100% digital input & HDCP support in your TV to be able to benefit from either of the formats.

If you have an older-style HDTV that isn't all digital + HDCP, then you'll get to watch your next-generation HD media in a glorious downsampled 1/4 of the actual resolution, because you're obviously a dirty media-stealing pirate. I mean, c'mon - only pirates could possibly have a need for analog inputs.

(That said, the Sony movie publishing branch just annouced that they will initially graciously allow their media in full resolution on old sets as well, but that's just one studio -- and they can change their minds back just as easily at some point in the near future, meaning that you still end up with a nice wide screen paperweight at that point.)

This is one area where it does NOT pay to be an early adopter... You may want to hold out just a little longer to see what the market will do.

My opinion: Blue Ray will die because of their security system. Although some security is nice, this one is done by Sony and I don't think I need to mention what Sony does to "copy protection" with their systemroot hacking crap (and similar illegal copy protections practics used on other discs like "make unreadable for CD-ROM")

Personally, if they don't get their act together, I think they will be bypassed by HVD (Holographic Video Disc):-

http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/12/19holograph.html

This is an emerging technology that seems to be going from strength to strength!

I mean, they are predicting 1.6 terrabytes on a disc the size of a DVD!!!

Amazing

Dabz

The problem with any super-high data density medium, is that a very small error/scratch/whatever can lead to very large amounts of lost data.

I have a feeling that a media with that kind of storage capacity will also re-introduce a protective casing, similar to a minidisc/zip disk/old CD caddy

Yeah, your right, but then again, CD/DVD disc are'nt exactly indestructable, these scratch quite easily.

Take a look at my poor Blitz3D disc, one ickle scratch has buggered the installer (Gives a bad sector error reading when trying to install, then shuts down!)

I feel (personally), that if it can hold that much data, then a protective casing will be worth it, I mean, it's better than having hordes of back-up CD's lying around!

Anyway, we'll just have to see at the end of the day.

Dabz

I'll let the dogs fight over their formats and marketing, I'll just wait and watch them. In the end I'll simply pick the winner. I'm sooooo *not* going to pick a side while they're fighting. :P

You also shouldn't buy series DVD-boxes when they're brandnew. Wait some months and they're 10 bucks cheaper. The last time I made that mistake was with the Indiana Jones box, 50 euro on release, only a short while later: 40 euro.. which it still costs afaik.

So, take as general rule: patience is a virtue, your waiting will be rewarded. ^_^

Yeah, seen that one before... At the time they released the Star Wars trilogy on VHS, at the time heavily touted as 'the last time they'll be released, ever... Of course shortly after I bought it, they announced that they were going to be doing the enhanced version, which had a whole new theatrical release (and of course a 'new' VHS and DVD launch as well)

> at the time heavily touted as 'the last time they'll be released, ever...

The ads mentioned something about them being the last time they would be released in their current form. (If I remember currectly)

The "enhanced" version includes Greedo shooting first (among other things).

Hey skid, u mind popping over to the DXTC thread :o)

lol. Nice try, Ross. :P

> a very small error/scratch/whatever can lead to very large amounts of lost data.


If the hologram disks are the same ones I was reading about a couple months back this would not be a problem. The data is stored in a somehow/somewhat redundant manner - so scratches would not be a problem. (as always, I'll believe it when I see it)

I'm rooting for Blu-ray. I can't put a finger on it, but it seems to be a technically better format. The promise of 50GB discs next year is also a nice thing to look forward to.

There's no way I'm going to be an early-adopter though. Disc prices are far too high.

The other thing that irks me is that when HD films start to become available, they will be lower quality than the ones I watch already. The ones already available for download are very similar to mpeg2 (they are .ts files, which encapsulate an mpeg stream) with much better colour range (and hence look better than equivalent DVD on a standard TV). The films which will be distributed on the read-only versions of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be heavily compressed (think WMV) and will lose too much quality, in my opinion.

So, my BD-R's will get used to back-up the HDTV streams I download so that I can play them back on my PC.

I wouldn't put too much faith in that -- regular CD's and DVD's also have built-in error correction mechanisms, but they too have issues with scratches.
(DVD's more so than CD, thanks to the higher data density.)

A side effect of some of those fun 'copy protected' audio CD media is that several of them work by purposfully writing bad data to parts of the disk, and relying on the built-in error correction system to regenerate the 'real' data, thereby messing with direct rips on a computer. Side effect is that those disks are a LOT more surceptible to damage, since effectively they threw the redundancy out of the window.

I can't image both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray getting to release stage if the discs are more susceptible to damage than DVD's. I'm aware of the higher data density and the problems a scratch can cause. One would hope that redundancy has been increase in direct proportion to the relative size of your average scratch.

Truth is in the testing, of course. I'm sure we will all find out sooner or later.

Mind you, being the proud owner of a 400 disc carry case almost full of movies, I can guarantee that less than 5 of them have any visible scratches. If I can take good care of easily replaceable DVD's, you can be damn sure I'll take good care of perhaps 400 Blu-Ray discs which may have cost me £5 each ;)

h.264 doesn't lose near enough quality for me to care about it. :)

I've been looking forward to Bluray for some 6 or 7 years now, but after Sony's recent DRM fiasco and no signs of things improving, it could well be the format that never was...

error correction can be made far far better if you use Nero Drive speed or a similar tool to slow down your discs speed to 4x or lower. The crap error correction is just because the discs spins that fast that half the data is already skipped and reconstructed by the correction data. So if those get a little scratch, it totally breaks at that speed. but with lower speed you can nearly scratch to the other side of the disk without many problems (as long as it is not a circular scratch)