I can't find a source link either, but there does not seem to be any question on the issue on the AVS forum.

Apparently the present blu ray format does not support PIP or certain interactive menu features and will be changed so that it can support these features. The new format is to take over on 10/31. All machines that are not 1.1 compliant (whatever that means) will not be able to take advantage of the additional features. No one seems to be too sure if the old machines will be able to play the new format

I am 100% sure that if this was not true, then the Blu Ray camp in the AVS forum would be raising HE*L.... they are not.

What seems to be the big debate however, is whether or not PS3 is involved in this.

I have been following this childish war between HD DVD and Blu-Ray for a year now. It seems that the Blu-Ray people thought they could bury the HD DVD camp because apparently the thought of two HD formats was more than they could bear. Despite the greater ability to grab the market share and the larger dollars the Blu-Ray camp has been losing out due to the following greedy mistakes:

1. Delays in releasing PS3 last year due to quality control issues.

2. The mistaken idea that gamers want to play movies instead of playing games.

3. The slowness to produce cost effective stand alone players.

4. The recall of at least four or five major movie titles in Blu-Ray format that had playability bugs.

5. Their assumption that stores like Best Buy would continue to push Blu-Ray over HD DVD as they had been doing in the beginning.

6. Their assumption that stores like Walmart would not get involved in marketing HD discs.

7. Handing out booklets like this that was included with the CES Daily News publication and made available to all attendees at the 2007 CES on the first day of the show. It was full of propaganda articles with distorted information and statistics (much of it based on "projected" sales and the assumption that PS3 owners all buy Blu-ray movies). Obnoxious.


In my opinion, there was room for both formats, but I guess that is why am a videographer and not a corporate executive.

John

I just was at Sam's Wholesale (a membership division of Walmart) yesterday. Where they used to have boxes of HD DVD players there were now boxes of Bluray players The demo of an HD DVD movie playing on a 50" plasma was replaced with a Bluray player playing (strangely enough) a combo HD DVD / regular DVD version of Superman. Yeah it looked pretty SD. Underneath the Bluray setup where a bunch of HD DVD movies. Usually stuff comes into Sams a few months before it makes it to the regular Walmart stores. Anyway, it looks to me suspiciously like Walmart may be changing sides.

Laurence,

What I was referring to in terms of Walmart is the supposed manufacture of inexpensive HD DVD players by some major Chinese companies soon. Walmart will be one of the major buyers according to some projections. Who knows. One such report in 2005 was discredited, but this one by The Hollywood Reporter sounds more legit. Still think there is room for both formats, but the Blu-Ray camp won't hear of it.

John

I thought I heard Target was endorsing bluray as well? I'm I accurate on this?

You all have it wrong. Target, WalMart etc don't give a crap about any format war. They don't have an oar in either camp. They will sell whichever makes them the most profit. Period. When WalMart does flood the consumer market with a sub-$200 HD-whatever player from China - the war will be over.

Steve

Say what you want about the "impending demise" of BluRay, but it's currently selling two to three times as many discs as HD DVD, despite the cheap HD DVD players that have been out for several months. Specifically, the figures released by Nielsen yesterday (Sunday) show that 74% of the high definition discs sold this past week were BluRay. And year to date, it's BluRay in the lead with 67%.

Target and Blockbuster and BJ's have all announced they will only sell Blu Ray titles.

At this point the war is not Bluray vs HD DVD, it's Bluray vs Bluray AND HD DVD. HD DVD is well beyond any chance of winning the format war entirely. I am kind of hoping that HD DVD holds out long enough for both formats to survive and for dual format players to be the norm. The only reason I hope this is because HD DVD seems like so much more practical a format for little guys like me.

Anyway, while I'm rooting for HD DVD to hold on, I must say that it sure looks better for Bluray at this point.

"Say what you want about the "impending demise" of BluRay, but it's currently selling two to three times as many discs as HD DVD, despite the cheap HD DVD players that have been out for several months."
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Yes... and you hear the same rubbish out of the HD DVD camp too. "Blu-ray is doomed"

Boy if I had a dime for everytime one of these camps was "doomed"!!!

The FACT is no one knows how many disks WHO has sold. No one knows who is winning, and no one knows who is losing.

The CES reports, Jon Peddie analysis' and other market indicators are all true to BD being the leading format at this point. Not only is it more attractive for resellers for a variety of reasons, it's got legs that HD DVD can't have.
IMO, it doesn't matter which one "wins" as much as creating a scenario where the consumer "wins."

"The CES reports, Jon Peddie analysis' and other market indicators are all true to BD being the leading format at this point. Not only is it more attractive for resellers for a variety of reasons..."
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Yes, and this is exactly why they decided that a major rebuild in the Blu ray standard was required............... right???

I don't know that they did, or didn't. It's not an applicable point to your last post. Either BD is selling more, or selling less than HD DVD. All market analysis and reporting show it to be selling more. Technical flaws or future changes in the format not withstanding.
Note that the key word in all discussions of the changes is "may."
There may be some backward/forward compatibility. Old movies *should* play in new players. Owners of older players will not be affected by newer technology; they simply won't have access to certain features that don't exist on the discs currently.
Other than FUD, I don't see the point of an uproar. Do you even own a BD player *right now?* I do, and I'm not concerned at all. I'd like to see those PIP commentaries, and may eventually update, but for now...I'll just watch the movie.

older players will not be affected by newer technology

As on older player I think I'm not alone in being affected by these newer technologies. Someone tell me, do any of them actually just play the damn movie?

This seems to be one of the advantages of stealing the thing via torrent, someone else has suffered all the grief of working out how to just watch the movie.

Bob.

". Someone tell me, do any of them actually just play the damn movie?"
===========================================================

Well, point of fact... the HD DVD technology has been reasonably solid right out of the starting gate. There has been the odd complaint of slow booting machines and stuttering (which I personally have not witnessed), but for the most part HD DVD has done performed exactly how it was supposed to. You can burn hybrid HD DVD disks MUCH easier and more reliable than BD, and you can fully author those disks, unlike BD.

The HD DVD burners will be out towards the end of August and it will be interesting to see if they come out clean and able to fully author disks as easily as the hybrids... or end up in the disappointed tailspin that BD has been so far.

"Do you even own a BD player *right now?* I do, and I'm not concerned at all. I'd like to see those PIP commentaries, and may eventually update, but for now...I'll just watch the movie."
================================================================
As a matter of fact...

I was in the process of gaining some information on the PS3 because I was toying with the idea of getting one when I ran into this blu ray mess. There is ONE thing (that I can see anyway) that BD (Sony) has done right so far, and that is to produce what looks like a pretty universal home entertainment device. But this bit of news has me put off enough so that I think I'll wait until all the dust settles..... and THAT'S the point. Sony MUST have known that this was going to raise both some dust, and some questions/hesitations. Obviously they feel "pushed" enough (by hd dvd I would imagine) to risk a bit of a storm cloud at this particular junction.

So I really wonder Spot... if BD is REALLY sitting so pretty, then why are they running around trying to fix something that supposedly isn't busted????

Now it may appear to you that what you're dealing with here is a HD DVD fanatic, and I assure you that's not true..... or at least it wasn't anyway. I have never really taken sides to this whole issue. I've always said that the one that can deliver the best bang for the buck gets my vote. But the longer this whole thing goes on, the more I just shake my head at the absolute stupid way that Sony has handled this new HD era, and ask myself more and more if I really want this ineptness to control the future format standard.

Sony has come out of the starting gate with prices that are WAY too high and they have been WAY too slow at dropping them.

They have produced a burner that has been on the market for quite some time now and you STILL can't fully author a disk without paying big bucks and jumping through 1001 hoops.

They produce a NLE that has absolutely NO BD support at all.

They produce a player that can't handle its own BD+r/-r disks.

Right in the middle of a format war they decide that their standard needs to be changed.

This Spot, to me anyway is beginning to sound like a very confused organization that does not deserve the time of day, forget being crowned the format winner.

Now to the other extreme, here we have Toshiba that has pretty much single-handedly held off Sony, Samsung, Pioneer...etc with a single, unchanged format and a couple of machines, no burner, and less studio backing......go figure!!!???

Now, I have No idea who WILL win this war, or even if there will be a winner, but after sitting back and looking at all of this.... I can sure tell ya who DESERVES to win.

I don't view this as Sony "fixing" anything as much as simply adding some new features. I seriously doubt that they would obsolete all the previous Bluray players. This hysteria is a bit premature (if it's justified at all.)

I guess it's just popular to hate Sony just like people hate Microsoft. Maybe you should simply rid yourself of all things Sony. (And send it all to me.) Ever since that first transistor radio I bought back in the 60s, I have loved all things Sony. I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their stuff and have never been disappointed.

John

"I guess it's just popular to hate Sony just like people hate Microsoft. "
========================================================

You have me pegged COMPLETELY and TOTALLY wrong.

I don't "hate" Sony at all. I own Sony cams, I own Sony NLE's... Sony TV's...etc. My feelings for Sony, good, bad, or indifferent, don't enter this arena in any way, shape or form.

I TRULY believe Sony has done a BAD job at promoting and standing behind its format. I have never seen so many untied ends in such a thing before. It's bad forethought, bad after thought, bad management, bad planning. I don't hate Sony at all... if anything, I'm extremely disappointed.

And this "hysteria" is not hysteria at all.... it's simply a finger being pointed at more bad planning and bad timing.

Sony had been delaying the decision on menu support, etc. for a very very long time.

Their concern was that somebody might hack the menu code (Java?) and use it to bypass the DRM, and they clearly thought that it was more important to keep the DRM hackers guessing than to release product for sale.

The ivory tower residents obviously have not figured out that no matter what they do, the system will be hacked.

In the meantime, Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD players with Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus are selling for $214.95 at http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HD-DA2-R&cpc=SCH (that's for a refurb, new are a few twenties more).

Sony used to be so in touch with consumers. I remember with fondness my audio cassette Walkman that I used for travel a long time ago; the player was all metal, no bigger than a cassette box, and it sounded great with only one AA battery. Amazing! Ditto for just about every one of their many products I bought (except for their noisy microphones).

I just listened to an interview with Eric Clapton and he said the "Recording (CD) Industry" is dead and buried. I believe the same thing is happening to the "Hollywood Movie Industry" but not as fast. The technology is changing so fast nobody knows what "gear" they are in. A perfect example: One day on Newegg there are no DDR3 motherboards. The next day there are 50. And the same day 13 new DDR3 memory chops. DDR2 is now dirty laundry.
JJK

"Their concern was that somebody might hack the menu code (Java?) and use it to bypass the DRM, and they clearly thought that it was more important to keep the DRM hackers guessing than to release product for sale."
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Interesting.

I wonder if this has anything to do with Sony's refusal to allow programs the free clearance to be able to fully author Blu Ray. MAYBE, the blu ray authoring front will change??

Regardless, I'm not doing ANYTHING Sony BD now until I see which way this all settles. The HD DVD burners come out soon anyway and I want to see what that's all about too. If they prove to be as inexpensive and dependable as the rest of the HD DVD system.... then I'm sold all the way with Toshiba.

It seems the BD camp will win, porn on BD will soon be flooding the Japanese market, maybe Sony does learn from history.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33134/98/

Bob.