HD-DVD offers a much better value proposition to the consumer. That value proposition comes in the form of three formidable advantages: (1) At this writing, HD-DVD image quality is clearly superior to Blu-ray, (2) HD-DVD player prices are half those of Blu-ray, and (3) HD-DVD has twice as many movie titles on the market as Blu-ray, and that ratio will hold through the end of this critical launch year. Evan Powell

If that (and the rest of the article) is anywhere near accurate, then I'd say it's a done deal. Reminds me of the original Beta debacle. How does the old saying go? "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

I fear that if Sony is going to keep marching a head with mpeg-2 and HD-DVD is using VC-1 (I think that all the HD-DVD realeases are currently using VC-1 - at least that's what I remember Ben saying at NAB, could be different now) and H264 - Blue Ray could be in trouble.

That analysis seems to be based on technical perspectives. Marketing strategies, decisions, and promotions will also have a huge impact. The VHS vs. Beta battle is an example.

Bear in mind at all times that Ben Waggoner is employed by Microsoft, and is essentially required to present VC1 in it's best possible light. Microsoft has a very strong hatred for Sony and BluRay, it is a well-documented, one-sided screaming match between Bill Gates (who allegedly was actually spitting his sibilants due to the loss of emotional control) and Howard Stringer allegedly just stood there and listened.
There is no love lost there, and I'd be reluctant to accept "facts" from either side with regard to this particular issue. If Microsoft didn't have such a strong hatred for Sony, then HD-DVD would have never had a chance to survive. Microsoft bailed it out of the gutter.
Could it still be a player?
Maybe. Maybe not. Xmas this year will determine much of both format's fate.

I don't know. It seemed to me the "review" was just a long marketing advertisement for HD-DVD. Not that I resent that, because I don't have any particular bias for or against Blu-ray.

In terms of quality, when both formats support the same (or equivalent) video codecs, there's no longer any difference between the two. The old analogy of "betamax" vs. "vhs" is not really valid, because Betamax was truly a higher quality format than VHS. With HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the technology is identical except for how far the laser is from the data. I think the debate is mostly about politics and industry egos. I don't pretend to know what format will win, but I also don't really care. You can put the same MPEG-4 or VC-1 data file on either format and it will deliver the *exact* same data stream... every "1" and "0" in the data stream will be the same. This wasn't true in the old analog wars of Betamax vs. VHS.

I'm just more interested in the industry settling the debates and picking a format. The quicker one format loses, the quicker we'll have high-def video production on our desktop... with Vegas 7 and DVD Architect 4. ;)

I have stated this many times and DSE has too, MS is at war with Sony. It all about the future of media and how it is used at home and on computing devices. BluRay, PSP3, Sony movie division and partners have failed to roll over for Gates vision of the future, which is exclusively a MS world of products. Apple's IPOD success is not in Bill's future model, so MS have a plan for it too.

I have read the article and carefully detailed out the data and studied the commentary and sentence structure. This, I believe, is a paid-for advestisement for HD-DVD, maded to look like a news article. HD-DVD and X360 needs all the help it can get.

Once Sony, Panny, and the other partners start releasing products, HD-DVD and MS will only have vaporware products to respnse with. Example, Sony new cameras will play on the PSP3 directly, Panny will be there too and many others. Then there are the studios, first they were concern about the MS noise, but Sony's assurance that the PSP3 will play movies, MS statements about BR became "me too!" became just noise. If you put the "StarOffice" products on PSP3, college students and colleges have options other that MS. The other fact that drives MS crazy is the Sony name is untouchable in the market place, even after a full out marketing war against Sony and its product line. Of course, Sony is not alone in this product line, many big manufacturers' of consumer goods are on board. The Future is WILD!

I guess what your saying is that the business people who run the big movie studios are not hedging their bets on who is the winner. I would have a put and call on each so I can't loose.

JJK

guess what your saying is that the business people who run the big movie studios are not hedging their bets on who is the winner

Not quite. Most of the big studios have placed their bets on BluRay. Some have hedged with HD-DVD, but the majority of support is on BD by a fair amount.
Read the interviews between Pioneer and Warner for instance. The comment was made that they need to work for the future. Stability and amount of storage is where the best gamble is placed, and that is where BD shines. Personally, I just want a way to deliver HD to the masses as soon as possible. I'm angry that M$ screwed a good portion of that from happening last March, but on the flip side of the coin, it also saved a lot of people from a lot of pain early on.

"Personally, I just want a way to deliver HD to the masses as soon as possible."

A-men! I'm hoping this format war turns into a good thing for the consumers, ala Intel / AMD. My fear is that this thing will get so confusing in the marketplace that everybody will just throw up their hands and it will take months/years for a reasonable HD delivery method to emerge.

There is another alternative:

Both formats "lose" and something else emerges.

Personally, I still think this is the most likely outcome. The personal ego vignettes provided in early posts help underline the obvious point that neither camp is likely to compromise or back down. Until that happens, most people are going to wait on the sidelines.

While there is one technical "solution" that lets one player play both formats (Toshiba, I think), it looks pretty expensive right now, and may or may not allow authoring/recording both formats on one machine.

On top of this, the early in-store demos of these products, as already pointed out earlier in this thread and elsewhere, are AWFUL. I saw a Blu-Ray demo at Fry's in the Bay Area that was bad beyond all description. I think it was a disk called "Ultra Violet," and the video exhibited what I have now learned is called "clay face" where all detail is missing. I'd much rather watch my DVD player hooked to my 1989 Pioneer 4:3 projector via S-video, than watch what I was looking at.

I WANTED to like it. But there was no way to get past the fact that it didn't look good. I have seen HD at the Sony Metreon in SF, and at trade shows, so I know what the good stuff looks like. This wasn't it.

While you can say, "well, that one store didn't have it set up correctly," the point is that if THEY can't get it set up correctly, then who can? More to the point, if the manufacturers can't control the quality of what gets shown in premier retail outlets (and is there a more important outlet than Frys in Silicon Valley??), then the consumer will never know what the format can do.

I should also point out that word of mouth is everything. I can still remember people talking about VCRs, then about CDs, and then DVDs, and then satellite, and then PVRs (TiVo).

You know, buzz.

I have not hear one regular person (i.e., someone not in this forum or in this business) talk to me about how they are really eager to get HD playback. Even those that have HD satellite, including those that have VOOM, are surprisingly muted in their enthusiasm, if you can even call it that.

So, never mind the format war. Both sides need to figure out how to get some interest generated in HD delivery, and I'm not sure they are going to be able to do that.

Of course, eventually we'll have HD, whether people are wanting it or not, but I expect that the full HD phase-in will be delayed again, and probably a few more times, before we get there. This will leave lots of time for someone to come up with an approach that makes a lot more sense and offers a lot more benefits for the consumer. I believe that this will be a more open (less DRM) format, and one that integrates better with streaming and TiVo.

Which brings me to my final point:

YouTube is the future. HD, while technically superior quality, is fundamentally rooted in the past, and controlled by companies who put their own interests ahead of the customers. That is why so many of the features in both HD formats provide no benefit to the user (like the discredited Circuit City DivX format). HD delivery on a disk is not necessarily a sufficient solution given the video world we now live in.

So while MS and Sony feud and battle, the Chinese might very well step in with something that wins the war.

Blue-Ray hasn't even really started yet. Wait until the PS3 is released, then the momentum will begin.

I read Mark Cuban's blog to keep up with his HD thoughts. As owner of Dallas Mavericks, most of his blog is dedicated to that. But as owner of HDNet, his HD thoughts and future of media delivery are interesting.

http://blogmaverick.com/

He said about a year ago that he forsaw a method similar to NetFlix, except you get a "hard drive" that you plug into your system. About 20 HD movies to choose from, watch what you want, return the drive, they load it back up and send it back out to you.

Granted, that was a year ago, and obviously the "drives" are not standard hard drives. But at least he has a vision, and lots of money, to come up with something new.

What I think is missing from these threads (BR vs HDDVD) is the fact that BR has twice the capacity of HDDVD. I don't know about y'all but I will have 1.3 terabytes of hard drive space online by Christmas - and at 50GB per disk (and upwardly goign to 200GB eventually) the Blu-ray is just that much better as a backup medium. I have 400GB online now and that is just about full!

There is another alternative:
____________________________________________

Possible, but exceptionally unlikely. Why? Because of content. For the desktop editor, the Chinese or other third party might step in, but for mass delivery? Not much of a chance.

Studios are already geared and licensed, and in a few cases, tooled/manufactured for BluRay or HD-DVD. Studios, ie content owners, want absolutely nothing to do with the Chinese, arms length isn't far enough for them. The Chinese have an exceptional reputation at pirating and redistributing media, and according to one panel I observed last year at NATPE, more money has been spent trying to thwart the pirates than has been saved in the process.
Owners of the content will stay the course of BD or HD-DVD (BD is by far and wide the big winner there) regardless of how antsy our small community becomes. The consumer is just now getting into HD displays, the consumer will next be introduced to HD delivery over DVD. It's a well-considered, well thought out plan, and so far, it's working. Regardless of how much it may frustrate some of us.

what people seem to forget is that fact taht as a storage medium BD offers more..

For me, i can wait to clear off drive after drive of reference material and jsut have a small shelf full of discs archived in order..
I wont have to bottleneck my drives or my capacity and i wont need to worry about drive wear and tear.

In addition to that, i cant wait to offer my standard def footage at a super high bitrate... compared to standard DVD, i can fit a whole production on one disc, using far less compression than what i do now..
it may not be 25mbps, but it can come close.. and when working wth dvcproHD.. this difference in compression will make a difference to the final products image quality..
Whether it be HD or Sd... the capacity offered and backwards compatibility of both HD DVD and BD to standrd DVD will allow us to offer our existing produts using less compression.

to me compression is the biggest "problem" affecting image quality, and if i can give a client a 1 hr SD dvd at 25mbps mpg2, then im offering them the closest level of quality to the orginal footage.

In addition to the above.. BluRay will also be the one format which has the available capacity to offer DolbyTrue HD.. whichis bit for bit audio to video..
id rahter have 25gb allocated to audio and video each, as opposed to 12gb...

Look at the end of the day, it doesnt matter what reviews say.. we all know that corporate bashing exists.. it has for many years.. People LIKE to bash the big corporations like Sony simply because they got nothing better to do.. Sony has grown in a way where one cannot trully fathom unless u outline what it is they have acheieved..
from movie studios, to producitons to distribution, trhough to broadcast and filmaking, through to prosumer and consumer, through to gaming and portable entertainment.
Virtually EVERY aspect of entertainment media has been a part of Sonys growth.. this wont EVER change.. and dont ever think that it will.. sure enough some formats failed.. but with teh push for BD adn higher capacity optical media, what other alternative is there? HD DVD.. yes.. but what else???
HDD?? hmm.. for the average joe, do u think theyll be able to know how ot access the files, let alone hardwire a HDD to a PC, install the necessary player and go at it??
No.. these companies rely on consumer consumerism.. being they buy from waht they know or understand. and if they dont, they will buy simply becuase its from a reputable company. How many Dell machines run with crap HW? How many HP machines have bios and other faults simply becuase of shoddy workmanship? And this is my point.. it doesnt matter HOW crap a prodcut may be... the fact that its backed by a reputable company makes the consumer believe tehir getting a good deal. They believe their getting a good product, even though theyre not.. but they DONT KNOW THIS... and this is what these large corporations are relying on..
Lack of information and education. .
How many consumers do u know who know what DVv, MPG, MPG TS, DVCPro yadd yadda..
very few.. how many of those do u knwo who understand the DIFFERENCES....

to them video is video.. if it looks good, that fine, if it looks crap, then its looks crap..
thats all they care about..

As for MS, its not about the format of BD.. its about market penetration of the gaming consoles. Sony have pretty much raped the world with their gaming hardware and MS know that when PS3 is launched, the 360 will have ALOT of work in front of it. MS rely on early adopters for market penetration. To be honest with you, the XBox really only took off when a copy circumvention chip was released. When HDD hacks were written and bios bypass and operating systems for the XBox were released. WIthot the piracy.. the Xbox would be dead in teh water.. the only thing keeping it alice is XBox Live... which now is also circumvented as chips can now be enabled and disabled for inline play.

Dont believe me?? well u should... The fact remains that without this piracy, the product WOULDNT have penetrated the market as it has. Without piracy, the cost of these units and software would just be too high for the averge family...

and dont give me this righteous crap about buying to support the developers.. u might think that buying a game might be fine for u.. but for the family with 4 kids, a mortgage, 2 cars, etc etc... this $100 bux spent on that one game can be put to use to feed the family for afew days..
that 100 bux can go towards a chip.. then for another 50c, that chip will allow u to play back a copied game...

If u had the choice.. which would u choose??

Most have decided... and this is why gaming has penetrated to such a fundamnetal extent.

Once the prodcut can be priced within the means of a family, that product will take off like a rocket.. the only thing that brings these products within those means is piracy
Its simple fact.. sad but true..

For the desktop editor, the Chinese or other third party might step in, but for mass delivery? Not much of a chance.
===================================================

Guess it depends on who the masses that'll get the "mass delivery" are. The combined middle class markets of China and India exceed the total population of the USA several times over. China could easily afford to buy Hollywood and all its assets although as said so far they seem to be getting the assets for free.
Underestimating the power of China would be a huge mistake, the dragon is waking, just out of this sparce country we're exporting the place to the tune of $1,000 per second.

Bob.

John - I couldn't have said it better.

"While you can say, "well, that one store didn't have it set up correctly," the point is that if THEY can't get it set up correctly, then who can? More to the point, if the manufacturers can't control the quality of what gets shown in premier retail outlets (and is there a more important outlet than Frys in Silicon Valley??), then the consumer will never know what the format can do."

As I've said all along, none of the marketing geniuses have reconciled with the "good enough" factor referring to the average home DVD player. There is nothing in the Blu-Ray/HdDVD spec *for* the consumer. All the benefits are to provide the content owner with viewing control. There is simply no compelling reason for the average consumer to spend the money to "upgrade" to HD.

China already has an HD spec that will work with 4.7gB red-laser discs. All that's missing to drive that boat is the Hollywood content.

Before this year is out, you will start seeing red-laser DVD players with WMV and DiVX codecs built in and selling for under $100. That's when the small producers can start factoring a player into their package price.

My prediction hasn't changed: Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will join the Laserdisc on the trash heap of incompetent marketing. It's the wrong solution for the wrong problem.

Steve M.

For the desktop editor, the Chinese or other third party might step in, but for mass delivery? Not much of a chance.

Spot, excellent point. Clearly the media powers can't stand the piracy from that part of the world and therefore wouldn't cooperate.

However, MP3 had zero endorsement from pretty much these same people and same companies, and yet prior to the iPod, pretty much every digital audio player was built around MP3 playback, despite MP3 having no DRM inherent in its design. It is still, I am sure, the most prevalent form of playback. Apple eventually started to "take back" the market from this open architecture, but it required brilliant marketing, fantastic industrial design, cutting edge user interface, and a laser-like focus on what the user wanted, even as they also introduced features that really only benefit the copyright holders.

I see absolutely nothing similar in the "well-considered, well thought out plan" that the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray consortiums are executing. Perhaps the plan is great, but if it is, the execution so far absolutely stinks.

So, in summary, I think you are absolutely correct that the content providers will not in any way cooperate with any company or country that introduces a format that doesn't provide Draconian DRM, but if a format provides great benefit, and people can encode and playback HD satellite (even if that have to re-encode), and their HDV footage, and the high-res video on the Internet, then it won't be long until HD movies -- despite whatever DRM is used to protect them, which will be broken, of course -- will appear in this new format, just as all the music in the world has found its way into MP3 files.

The people that run these companies are exceptionally slow learners. If that wasn't true, they would have bought Napster instead of running it out of business, and would have offered 99 cent download, with dozens of extra features that the pirates couldn't have offered (I can give dozens of examples that even Apple hasn't done yet) in order to provide benefits over the free downloads. But of course these are the same people that tried to kill TV, rather than embrace it, when they owned the movies; and then tried to kill the VCR; and then tried to kill music downloading.

This is a major war over media control. Simple marketing plans do not work in a global knock-down war. Think chess, not checkers. The major alliance Sony has, ranges from hardware and software design to general consumer product lines to media content producers. MS has HP, but no media producers that is investing major money to promote HD-DVD. This requires the HD-DVD player manufacturers to sub. the pricing of the players because of the forecoming PSP3 release. Sony can package TVs with players/PSP3s and special media offerings. Will MS and HP sub. putting TVs and HD-DVD players and X360's together? Wall Street investors will not like HP investing big cash for MS war with no return for HP. Plus MS is not known for sharing profits with ext. companies.

"China step in ". China is far from being a technology threat at this time, they are coming a major consumer of modern goods, just not a producer for "walmart". India general software development is stronger than China's, weaker that Japanese or South Korean. China or India are not able to complete with the Japanese,S.K.,U.S. or U.K. Market wise, China is strong compared to India, still very dependent of the "others" for creative design and development.

Actually, buying those HD-DVD players is helping the blu-ray side, forcing the HD-DVD alliance to sub. selling and marketing the product, forcing MS to spend more on X360 redesigns for HD-DVD, MS will have to intro Tvs soon; brand name issues I think, TVs, Ipods with the blue screen of death......."brought to you by MS"....
the battle with the Ipod will be expense and very costly if MS loses.

If a format becomes popular enough companies have to start thinking how to use it positively.

If DVD player manufacturers add support for DIVX HD and WMV HD playback etc, etc then someone will have to sit up and take notice.

The problem with both Blu-ray and HD-DVD is the cost of replication compared with the market available for smaller DVD producers. Special interest DVD's for example will have no chance in this new world. Sometimes the demand for some subjects is marginal evenm on standard def DVD. So with the market fragmented between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray things become even worse.

A lot of this will be dependent upon the success or failure this fall of PS3 according to Fox Interactive. Their projection is for huge numbers of Blu-Ray titles to be released after this fall as compared to HD titles if PS3 takes off.

I bought a Toshiba HD-A1 for upconverting after being disappointed with the Cyberhome 655 many on this forum bought last year. It is designed to play HD and flies off the shelves after each allocation. There is an RCA equivalent - same deal.

It is difficult to say with any certainty what will happen. The home entertainment industry and stores like Best Buy will probably have a lot to do with it I would think.

John

As said earlier, both formats use the same compression codecs. As such, it is more about the amount of storage. Blu-ray = 50 GB, HD-DVD = 30 GB. Try backing up a 750 GB harddisk! Personally, I hope holographic storage will be the winner with 300 GB+ per disc.

InPhase Technologies

If I am not mistaken InPhase Technologies was a spinoff from Lucent which already had discs that used 8 different color lasers. Could be some of those old Bell Labs guy's are involved ala Google.
JJK

Why is anyone still doing backups to removeable media?

I'll admit I'm still a bit of a Ludite myself and still do it however I also see it as being a very expensive way to live and a not very failsafe one either.

HDDs are about cost parity per GB with DVDs and I don't see any of the new formats being any cheaper per GB, I rather suspect they'll be even more expensive and that's before you factor in your time and that nagging fear that you've forgotten something. Also I suspect that the whole thrust of Vegas's MM is to keep all assets on line or at least near line.

My medium term goal is to keep all assets on a server running RAID 5, at least if something fails I have a chance to recover it.

My slightly longer term goal is to back that server(s) up to off site storage, a simple ftp connection will take care of that along with some quite cheap software. The great thing (hopefully) is I don't have to do anything once it's up and running. Even if the place burns down I could be up and running in a few days.


What I also find kind of quaint is the notion that there's a serious market for buying movies, as in going to a shop and buying a physical object. Sure my generation might still think that's the way things should be but as a market force mine and the next generation are pretty much a spent force. There's a whole generation with the deepest pockets that are very young, very computer literate, own at least two computers each, have networked everything and don't even own a DVD player, a CD player or any traditional media player. Everything runs out of their computer, I think they beat MS to the idea of the HTPC by a few years. They sure aren't going to go to a shop to buy a movie, they'll be downloading it, they're not going to buy a 'box' at any price to watch the thing either.

And the other odd thing I've only recently noticed. My better half still lives in fear of driving our traditional DVD player / TV thing but she has no problemo clicking on a file in a folder and watching it on a laptop.

Bob.