Comments

JJKizak wrote on 12/10/2005, 5:47 AM
Looks good to me but then again they don't make any 20 minute HD- wmv movies for DVD-R discs so we would have to have the movies on about 4 discs. That would give us 3 pee-pee breaks.

JJK
farss wrote on 12/10/2005, 5:52 AM
Actually uStuff do have a few titles that fit onto a single DL DVD, from memory T2 is available.
Bob.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 12/10/2005, 7:00 AM
> why do we have to dance to the beat of their drum

Let’s see... oh yea... The OWN the content! ;-)

Seriously, I think products like these do more harm than good. It’s bad enough that there are standards wars between BlueRay and HD-DVD, but now customers are further confused with devices that will not play HD Hollywood movies once they are available but then it’s too late for the customer to realize they made a bad purchase. Then again, they can watch it on their brand new EDTV that some slimeball company passed off to them as HD so what do they know. <tongue planted firmly in cheek> (ouch! That hurts!) :-D

~jr
Steve Mann wrote on 12/10/2005, 8:03 AM
Did you see the LAN connectivity in the specs?

I am predicting that HD-DV and Blu-Ray will be consumer marketing duds. The format (I.E. content control) wars don't help, but the price tag for HD players and the content will be the breaking point.

I think that the format wars will rage for another two or three years as the consumer moves on to "good enough". There are a few under $100 players on the market that will decode and play MPEG4 and WMV video, but this is the first player I saw with 720p and 1080i outputs.

The content will follow the market. By next year, you won't be able to find a new DVD player without MPEG4 decoders built in.

Steve Mann

Wes C. Attle wrote on 12/13/2005, 6:22 AM
Steve, I generally agree with you. Mainstream will never adopt HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Instead Holographic HVD will steal the show in a couple years.

Going from 4.7/8.5 GB DVD's to 50 GB blu-ray or HD-DVD just won't be worth the trouble. True high def TV's 1080 60p etc will demand much larger media. HVD is set to launch with 300 GB disks and grow to 1 or 2 TB last time I checked. That's more like it in my opinion!
farss wrote on 12/14/2005, 1:06 AM
Why do you think we'll need such huge amounts of storage?
Existing DL DVDs can hold a movie in 1080 with good encoding.
Bob.
Wes C. Attle wrote on 12/14/2005, 3:50 AM
I think we will utilize large amounts of storage for a number of reasons. The forecasts for consumer desktop PC's suggest that 1 to 2 TB of disk space will be the standard for new PC's sold in 2007. (This partially because RAID 1 is expected to become popular for consumer desktops).

The new demand for DVD storage will extend beyond single movie DVD's to every day Joe's who need to backup all their high-def video recorded from various sources, the kid's birthday party, and for storing all the standard 8 megapixel family photos. It is inevitable that we will see another surge is demand for storage space on both hard disk and DVD. More hard disk space translate into more demand for alternative backup media.

The storage space demand is just starting to spike again. 700 MB CD's used to seem huge. Soon 50 gb DVD's will seem really small. HD-DVD and Blu-ray were just too slow to go to market. I think missing this year's Xmas sales season is the sign of technical and standards battles that went too far for too long. I bet media/movie companies will still push them, but they will hold a read-only niche market just for movie sales and rentals, once HVD prices drop to consumer levels in 2008.
farss wrote on 12/14/2005, 4:14 AM
Well for storing large amount of data, as opposed to a shiny disk we can drop into a player, there's already plenty of solutions that are quite cost effective.
Rev disks are good for 35Gb and are random access unlike any of the optical media and that can be a big plus. HDDs are very cheap per GByte as well and more reliable than most optical media for archiving. This is one factor that doesn't get anywhere near enough attention, I don't care if it'll hold 2TB, it's useless if the data will not outlive me (not that that's likely to be that long).
Bob.