I believe JVC already makes a deck that will playback full quality WMV. Check this link.

http://pro.jvc.com/prof/attributes/features.jsp?model_id=MDL101546

It isn't hard for the industry to see. They see it well and it scares them.

Man, that thing is kool. Will play back M2t files and only $399.00 list price. Plus wmv and ts on standard DVD media
Just bought one from B & H for $379.00
In stock.

JJK

IOdata is a good company.

JJK,

Let us know how it works out for you.

Corey

Probably won't get it till next week. I checked the specs and it will play DL discs. That means 1 hr at max bitrate according to their literature. It will also play external USB drives and cards. So it would take 2 dual layer discs for one movie. If it plays m2t files as well as the MY-HD card I will like it. Wondering how it will handle the split on the dual layer discs, if an m2t file can be split. Or HD-WMV.

JJK

Down here the industry mags are saying the silly consummers are holding back technology. Huh?
The hardware makers want us to have wired homes with content being streamed from our own servers, anything, anywhere, anytime. These guys have never talked to the content providers.

And yet our biggest telco (Telstra) is about to offer 17,000 movies for download and they're excluding the bandwidth used by the download from your monthly limit.

Bob.

Let us know if the JVC unit will play 1080 m2t files. In reading the specs, it looked like it may support 720 only.

I believe JVC already makes a deck that will playback full quality WMV.

Boy, this sure seems like a repeat of what we saw with MP3. No industry standards, but a technology that let everyone do what they wanted.

Even if one of the two HD standards finally wins out, I bet that the successful players will be the ones that play WMV, MP4, MOV, and all other forms in which HD can be delivered.

This would be similar to the CD players that can play not only the "approved" audio CDs, but CDs that contain MP3s. And, it's similar to the DVD players that not only play the DVD standard, but also play the VCD format, which was never a real standard, and even various "SVCD" and even more bizarre alternative formats that were created, ad hoc, by people trying to get better quality in less space.

Let's all support these alternative formats.

Problem with this deck for the average home user is you won't find and HD video of any Hollywood movie, right?

I doubt that you will see Hollywood embrace any mode that doesn't have total control over your viewing permissions.

But, I still predict that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be collossal marketing failures. There just won't be enough people buying the hardware. They have vastly underestimated the "good enough" factor of DVD on SD. Plus the cost of the hardware is an order of magnitude greater than SD television which reduces your potential market by, you guessed it, an order of magnitude.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will join Polavision, Cartrivision and Videodiscs in the museum of "they just don't get it" technology.

Steve

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will join Polavision, Cartrivision and Videodiscs in the museum of "they just don't get it" technology.

I think you are on to something, although I don't think the conclusion will be quite that bleak. Perhaps Laserdisc might be a better analogy. However, the hope that these will totally fail, and that some other technology, not supported by "Hollywood," will prevail is very unlikely. Just look to DAT tape, which scared the music industry and they refused to support it. It died, except for the small niche for field recording, etc. Hollywood will have to support a format in order for the movies to appear in that format. However, the companies that make the players will have to provide the ability to playback the "better" more open file formats, just like the audio CD players now mostly play MP3 files.

I do think the ramp up will be very slow, however, for whichever of the two competing standards prevails. It is just going to take a long time for Hollywood to convert many movies to the HD standard, although I think some of the more recent movies have already been scanned at higher resolution in anticipation of this changeover. The older stuff will take a LONG time. Also, as you point out, the increment from DVD to HD is not as great as from VHS to DVD.

Yes, there is a huge increase in resolution, but you don't have all those other benefits that we got going from tape to DVD. When we went from VHS to DVD, we got ALL these wonderful benefits:

1. Instant access
2. Menus
3. Much space required to store the discs compared to bulky VHS cassettes
4. Virtually zero wear from multiple playback
5. No dropouts
6. Advanced sound encoding
7. Subtitles
8. Multiple languages
9. Multiple audio tracks
10. Multiple angles

By contrast, going from DVD to HD disc, we get better picture quality. Period. Great stuff, but far from the compelling, must-have proposition listed above.

By contrast, going from DVD to HD disc, we get better picture quality. Period

Not so. Lockable/unlockable assets, embedded games, memorabilia, virtual museums, completely installed websites, that's just the tip of the icebert of what the DAM is bringing to the format. I attended a demo a few weeks ago of a product that blew my mind, that makes the intangible, tangible, and will be eventually distributed in these formats as well. Back to the real/now/in a few weeks....
Imagine watching your favorite film, and having EVERYTHING from that film available to you. Not just BTS, but alternate edits, and a user configurable "edit" of the film. Additionally, a game or two might be on the disc that uses scenes from the movie. There is more potential if the BD consortium is to be believed, but either way...it's coming. And I don't believe for a second that hollywood or anyone else has underestimated the market. Search back a year, and read how many folks here said they were not buying HD displays. Yet CES last year predicted sales within a few million units as to where we are at this year, and CES, Market Research, and Peddie are all independently predicting identical numbers of 20 million sets in 2006, and 50 million in 07. Consumers will definitely being doing the SD to HDMI upscale for a while, but that suits Hollywood just fine. They've adopted the format for so much more...and consumers (like it or not) will be buying it, because it's all there is on the shelf in 24 months. Hollywood (based on panels I've attended) isn't at all expecting the "rush" to BD players that people here keep talking about. They're expecting a 36 month market saturation of 60%. That's pretty slow and easily doable. Heck, we won't even see affordable desktop burners for at least 14 months for BD. We can buy XDCAM HD decks now, but those won't help with the end user at all.

Buy the movie with highend gaming all on one disk and a smooth interface between movie and gaming with BD tech. This is what worries MS.

Somehow I think it's going to flop.
Nothing to do with the format, simply to do with where people are at these days. Maybe I've got a skewed view of the world but most of the people I know just don't have the time to spare to sit down and watch a movie, regardless of how it's delivered. Adding more widgets to the movie adds zero value if you don't even have time to watch just the movie.
Now if someone can just figure out a way to get 100mins of moving images into our brains in 10 seconds, that'd sell.
I think the reason for the huge success of mp3 players isn't becuase of the price it's because it lets you cram the music experience into what used to be down time while travelling. Talking books are very popular, no one has time to read a book so we listen to the book while we're in transit.

BTW: DAT didn't take off because the CD arrived. It's still (shudder) used a bit in studios, my DAT has paid for itself many times over.
VCD and SVCD support is part of the DVD spec as is mp3 audio playback.
Pirated high definition versions of many movies seem to be available for download.

Bob.

Bob, Sony is expecting that the psp3 and the high tech camera market will drive the BD market even if the movie market will be slow. DSE has posted that he has seen BD in TV production studios. Sony has been really pushing 1080p displays in a big way..... because no dvd upconvertion will complete with BD on a 1080p in a side-by-side comparsion. When the new Spiderman 3 comes out on BD with all its features, the "must have crowd" will be buying, the new S3 has many new chars and special effects, I can not see how it can fail with youth market!

Lockable/unlockable assets, embedded games, memorabilia, virtual museums, completely installed websites ...

I don't know ... speaking strictly for myself, not one of those grabs me, even a little. The asset locking is strictly a benefit for the studio and the rest ...

I'm sure not going to pronounce both formats dead on arrival, but I'll stick with my prediction that the uptake is going to be VERY slow, and this will provide lots of time for something else to happen. I certainly don't believe for a second those cockeyed forecasts. I still vividly remember Portia Isaacson, the founder of Future Computing, which used to provide forecasts to the "microcomputer" industry in the early 1980s, making these astronomical forecasts for UNIX desktop computers. According to her, UNIX was going to outsell DOS by 1984, or something like that and in numbers that were about 10x of what total computer sales actually turned out to be. From that point on, I started keeping track of forecasts vs. the eventual reality.

Whenever these forecasts come from companies that make their livings selling their forecast data back to the industries they cover (which is how this game works), the forecast are ALWAYS high, and usually by a very large integer multiple.

People are buying HD monitors for a variety of reasons, but I am willing to wager that "planning for HDTV" isn't it.

How about - the sales person is scaring the customers from SD because of the 2009 digital changeover? (The sales person usually doesn't know the difference from HD and Digital).

Or, there's no SD left on the shelf?

All which adds up to the hype that HD penetration is so big. Few, very few people will spend the money to upgrade their home entertainment system just to get a better picture. Unlike VHS to DVD, which was an easy choice since the hardware cost differential was small. DVD to HD-DVD is an order of magnitude higher cost. The market analysts have completely underestimated the "good enough" factor. We're talking about a market full of people who let their VCR timers blink "12:00" (which spawned a whole new product line - remember VCR Plus?). We're talking about people who never adjusted the "chroma" on their analog TV. You really think that they will spend $400 or more for an HD player when their $35 DVD player still works?

Steve

"Sony has been really pushing 1080p displays in a big way"

Damned if I can find a 1080 display in the Sony consummer lineup, they're might be the odd one or two but almost all of their 'new' lineup including the horrid Bravia is NOT 1080, it's 720. Yes it'll accept a 1080 signal but it's displayed on a 720 res screen.

And down here in PAL land the step up from 720x576 to 1080x720 isn't all that big. But it gets worse, the aliasing, ringing and artifacts on the Bravia are so bad my SD 16:9 el cheapo CRT based TV looks way more HiDef than the Bravia.

Bob.