riredale.... im busted.
there's a couple more that we forgot, smoke signals and tribal drums. being 'PC' n all.

Seeker:
Your not in the minority on the 2.35 x 1 aspect. I am suspecting it was the European influence (If there was any) of the old defunct 2 x 1 aspect that was floating around years ago. There was a lot of negative about the wider aspects which were around 2.66 x 1 at the start. I like em wide.

JJK

I posted a thread here only last week entitled "Was 16:9 a mistake for HD." I believe it was but many responders did not. Read it.

Here is a precised version of the current war position from the BBC:

Winning arguments

The two groups, the HD DVD Promotion Group and the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) have spent some time arguing why their technology is better than the other.

At one point, there was hope that the two would collaborate on a hybrid solution, but there has been no agreement so far.

Although the computing and entertainment industries are keen to avoid two formats, the computing industry has overcome such problems in the past by offering drives that can read different formats.

But the industry has learned from early format wars, such as the battle between VHS and Betamax video formats, which resulted in consumer confusion and the demise of Betamax.

Backers of Blu-ray technology argue it is a more sophisticated technology with a greater storage capacity.

HD DVD supporters say their preferred technology will be available sooner and will be cheaper.

Toshiba said it had developed the first laptop with a next-generation HD DVD drive in it. It said they would be available by the start of next year in Japan.

Things seem to keep changing. Paramount decided they'll put out movies on Blu-ray as well as HD-DVD, and now Toshiba says they are still trying to arrive at a common format:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=11942

From London Times:

"Paramount’s move tips the balance of power in favour of Blu-ray, which now boasts support from roughly two thirds of major film studios, with exclusive backing from Sony Pictures, MGM, Disney and Twentieth Century Fox.

"The addition of Paramount and Warner Bros to Blu-ray’s support base would leave only Universal exclusively backing Toshiba’s format."

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9071-1809490,00.html

Jeremy

EDIT: add Times reference

The content owners prefer Blu-Ray for it's superior useage control. With Blu Ray the content owners can control which devices you can play the disc on, and even how many times. They even have technology from Macrovision that will disable ripping software. (http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40617.html)

The disc makers prefer HD DVD because the changes to their production line are insignificant compared to buying new manufacturing equipment for Blu-Ray.

When finally introduced into the consumer market, the players will cost several hundred dollars for either version.

Of course, by then you will be able to buy a $50 DVD player at WalMart that will play MPEG4, WMV and Divx discs. Not quite HD, but an order of magnitude cheaper. (No, wait - you can buy these now).

I think that Sony and the other content owners really, really overestimate the value of HD to the consumer. Quite honestly, I don't think that they care about quality either, but what they really want is the content control of Blu-Ray.

This is going to be interesting.

Steve

Paramount's Announcement

The typical tv watcher really doesn't care about 16 x 9, 4 x3, HD, Digital, red carpets, green walls, screwdrivers, fat people that aren't fat, stretched limo honda civics that aren't limos, etc. The only thing they care about is a picture on the screen that fills the screen period. Let's see, 10000 % linearity distortion. The over the air tv stations around here now are all starting to show horizontally expanded only pictures on the digital HD channels when not transmitting HD. It's just God awful. They are not sending whatever they should be sending to view the correct aspect even when transmitting HD, they expand the 4 x 3 out for full screen horizontally only. Sometimes they forget to do something and the actual HD program reverts to 4 x 3 SD expanded horizontally only. NBC, PBS, and FOX are OK but ABC and CBS are terrible with the aspects. All of them show the distorted 4 x 3 aspect during the day prior to hd programming with the exception of PBS.

JJK

They even have technology from Macrovision that will disable ripping software.

Bwah-hah-hah-hah-haaaah!

I wonder how many hours it will take some 16-year old to make the ripping software invisible...

As long as there is a computer involved somewhere, I don't see how they can possibly protect content.

Content owners like that Blu-Ray manufacturing is much more expensive to set up.
Perhaps the assumption is that pirated copies would have to be on the same medium....

Wouldn't they get more bang for the buck going after illegal distributors of pirated copies?

Secret coding is really kind of a joke to me. It started with during the cold war the codes that send the B-52's loaded with H-bombs go/no go
orders which come to find out that the Russians were on the list for the monthly code books and new everything that was going on the same time we did. Then the super duper crypto 79 digit codec was broken in the 70's. Do the record companies really think they can code something up that can't be broken? Futility.

JJK

I feel you're all missing the point...
HD-DVD is a short term, albeit cheaper alternative.
Whether viewers right now, today care or don't care about the quality of the image is probably fairly accurate. They don't care about CNN using videophones and they don't care about skinny people getting fat when the screen is stretched.

We're in a period of transition. We're more sensitive to it in this community than the rest of the world, because we're closer to it. Just for giggles, spend an hour down at the local stores. I try to do this at least once, usually twice a year. Play stupid, play ignorant. Ask questions of the guys standing around you. Listen to what they say. you'll be surprised.

BluRay is about SO much more than protecting content. It's about better/faster seek times, substantially more storage, leveraging future-looking technology, safer media storage/greater longevity (allegedly) interactivity, greater access for the consumer, since "locked" media can be placed on the disk that can be unlocked at point of purchase over television or web...Is BD the total answer? I dunno. I've got over 2,000 DVDs that are likely going to be obsolete someday. I don't love the idea of replacing them all w/BD (or HD-DVD) versions.
But to relegate the impetus for BD to the realm of DAMS and protection is simply silly.

... they don't care about skinny people getting fat when the screen is stretched.

That seems to be true here in the U.S., but I remember seeing that the widescreen TVs in Europe have had intelligent stretching since 1995 or thereabouts.

They stretched a 4:3 image to 16:9 without the skinny person getting fat (when the skinny subject is in or near the center of the picture).

They sure have been pokey in getting content out in HD though.

Some people are concerned that the data bits in Blu-Ray disks are only 0.1 mm below the surface, fearing that they will be sensitive to scratches.

This may be a non-issue, but jaded people may remember the "absolutely indestructible CDs".

The battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD may end up like SACD vs. DVD Audio (whatever it is called), with everybody waiting before buying new equipment.

And then, by the end of next year we may have low cost commercial HVDs (Holographic Versatile Disc) with possibly even 1TB storage initially and 3.9 TB coming, both read-only and recordable disks, a 1 Gb/s transfer rate, and inherent great abuse tolerance.

I would give HVD at least a sporting chance of arriving in time to kill both BD and HD-DVD (because of their lack of agreement), but as with all new technology we won't know for sure how well any of these work until they have been out in mass production for a while.

To me all of these technologies are ever so steam age, they all revolve around buying a physical entity. As has been more than amply demonstrated the next (or is it current?) generation doesn't do that, they download content. The only hurdle might be educating them to the idea of paying for it.
If you think downloading a movie in HiDef to be impracticle think again, the pipes of the web are getting much fatter down here with ADSL2. Things could be sped up by caching in the local exchanges. How to pay for this content, let the telcos handle it.
The REALLY big question to me is where is all this HD content going to come from, there's huge catalogues of movies that were only transferred at SD, I think a dozen or so 2K Spirits would be a good investment if this thing does take off.
Bob.

totally unrelated, but back in college, my history teacher asked us if the memories or capacity of the human brain could be contained on a single cd. the whole class laughed at the idea. I'm still waiting to be proven right. HVD is tickling my payback funnybone just a lil'.

man... i should just let it go.....

There are some people around here who's total brain could be put on to a 5" floopy. Anyone not in this catagory remember what a 5" FD would hold? Was it 640 KB?

5 1/4" floppies started out at 100KB and reached 1.2MB before fading into the sunset.

Before that, there were 8" floppies. These were not created for desktop computers, but for large IBM mainframes in the early 1970s, to allow for quick reboots.

Capacity was initially 100K, but the most popular sizes were 250KB (soft sector) and about 316KB (hard sector).

Radio Shack's Trash-80 (er, "TRS-80", what were they thinking?) desktop computer could use 500K 8" floppies....

I think the power of the human mind is not in the storage capacity, but in its ability to deal with the unexpected and unforeseen.

"Content owners like that Blu-Ray manufacturing is much more expensive to set up.
Perhaps the assumption is that pirated copies would have to be on the same medium...."

Well, that would certainly be a stupid assumption. (But then, have the Hollywood content owners done anything not stupid lately?)

Pirates would do one of three things: Recompress to DVD, Make an MPEG4 HD on DVD, or burn the copy to HD DVD.

"Radio Shack's Trash-80 (er, "TRS-80", what were they thinking?) desktop computer could use 500K 8" floppies...."

Trivia question - what does the Model number mean?

I claim today's star prize, the brand new Sony Z1 with matte box and wide angle converter.

Traditional Registration System

Mike

Tandy Radio Shack.

Based on the Zilog Z-80 processor chip.

Worked well if you whacked it about 80 times on the side.

What's amazing is that the Z-80 is still seeing strong sales today!

In 1977, Federico Faggin came to my office with a chip in his pocket, and he said "this chip will revolutionize the industry!" That chip was a prototype of the Z-80.

It nearly did, except for one very minor but totally fatal decision. I suspect it was <deleted>'s fault, but we may never know.

Zilog offered a chip that ran at 2.5 MHz instead of the 2 MHz of intel's 8080 CPU, and it had 158 instructions including all 78 of the 8080's instructions. Brilliant!!!

What could possibly go wrong?

Well.... Somebody at Zilog thought he had found a miss in the 8080 chip. Some 8-bit arithmetic operations generated a parity bit but no carry. The parity bit was generally useless, and nobody had even heard of anyone who ever used this feature. But the "stroke of brilliance" was to repurpose the parity flag into a carry bit instead, and voila, you had much faster 16-bit arithmetic which was very useful indeed!

Unfortunately, when customers heard that the new chip was 100% compatible, "except that one never used bit had been modified to great benefit", they got worried. "What if I ever get an 8080 program that uses this bit? Then it won't run properly!!!"

So, after the initial success, Zilog was run over by Intel's suddenly rapid progress, and had to make a living making embedded CPUs for microcontrollers.

The 2005 model of the Z-80 is called the eZ80 and runs at 50 MHz as well as getting four times as much done per MHz, more goodies on-chip including an IP stack, dynamic web page creation and 16 MB RAM handling, see Zilog's eZ80 family.