"The only downside (a big one) is no support for menus. Still, at the cost of DVD media (no $20 coasters), this is great. And the video is beautiful."

Have you looked at Dr DivX for generating menus?

Steve M.

You said "The only downside (a big one) is no support for menus. "

DVD MF5 does let you do simple menus, and they are animated with your video as well. Not what you normally expect but better than nothing. The key is having a path to get that HDV onto HDTV's for a dime a disk. I wonder how many decades will it be before BlueRay or even native Hd-DVD are cost competitive?

BigRockies.com Your Home in the Rockies!

"I wonder how many decades will it be before BlueRay or even native Hd-DVD are cost competitive?"

Damn, folks, it's a brand new technology, give it some time!

When I bought my first CD burner back in 1995, the drive was $1,500 and blank 650 meg discs were $25 each. It didn't take long after that for the price of each to reach a "reasonable" level. I'm 100% certain that the same will happen for BluRay and HD-DVD, just like it did for CD and DVD burners (or any other technology, for that matter.)

John

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will never come down to today's DVD prices for two reasons.

First, because of the millions of legacy DVD players that are "good enough" in the consumers homes, there is no volume pressure like there was for DVD. Add to that the confusion over the format differences and HD-DVD/BD are (in my opinion) doomed to the same oblivion as HD-Audio and the Laser Disc The overreaching copy prevention that doesn't let you watch HD at HD resolutions unless every component in the path is fully compliant with DRM (Draconian Rights Management) dictated by the Hollywood studios is also going to backfire.

Second: There's just too many patent licenses in an HD/BD disc. (Over 100) A couple of the key patent holders have set their license fee at $1.50 per copy but most are in the pennies per copy or less. Added all together, according to Medialine (the DVD replicating industry trade magazine) the licenses for every HD/BD DVD disc (including blanks) total a few dollars.

Also, in almost every issue of Medialine and in Post (a television production trade magazine), there's an editorial or column about the problems the author had setting up and watching their HD systems in their home theater. These guys are supposed to be the experts - what hope does the average minimum-wage teenager at Best Buy have?

HD-DVD/BD are doomed to the dustbin of good technology killed by the greed of the content owners. Again.

I don't know what's so hard about it. You plug the HD DVD/BD player's HDMI or component output into your HDTV and you watch HD the best it can be seen. The cost of HD discs is only a few dollars more than regular dvds, and its worth every penny. I have read a few complaints of incompatibility with certain players and TVs but those are more of the exceptions than the rules.

"I don't know what's so hard about it. You plug the HD DVD/BD player's HDMI or component output into your HDTV and you watch HD the best it can be seen. The cost of HD discs is only a few dollars more than regular dvds, and its worth every penny. I have read a few complaints of incompatibility with certain players and TVs but those are more of the exceptions than the rules."

Some players require you to boot up the player in analog mode to set the resolution for your set. Hardly plug and play but I understand your point.

Second, BD and HD DVD discs I have seen are roughly $21-25/ea which is definitely more than a few dollars over current dvd-r prices. Ill stick with playback on DVD5/DVD9 using advanced compression. Besides, take a video card with a DVI out into your HDTV using H.264 AVC at 1080i/720p, and you cant tell the difference from a BD/HD DVD disc. I didnt believe it either until I seen it with my own eyes.

Setting up my Toshiba A1 HD DVD player was a lot easier than setting up my first DVD player in 1999. It took people a long time to understand the difference between the 16x9, enhanced, widescreen, letterbox, full-frame, and pan and scan settings. Many people couldn't figure out how to hook dvd players up to their tvs because dvd had no coaxial outputs!

I was referring to HD DVD movies (not writeable discs) being priced only a few dollars more than dvds. HD DVDs are about the same price as dvds were when they came out in the late nineties. And at that time VHS movies were much cheaper like dvds are today. But I didn't mind paying a few dollars more for dvds over VHS because they were so much better. Just as I don't mind paying $20 for an HD DVD.

I agree that H.264 is a very good codec, but if it is made from an HD master recorded from satellite or cable, its not going to look as good as a VC-1 HD DVD made from a studio HD master. The source just isn't as good.

The previous poster compared HD DVD/BR to laserdisc when it clearly is not in the same niche category or costs $50+ each like laserdiscs often did. He then suggested that the setup process is not only difficult for experts but clearly too complicated for your average consumer. It isn't. People caught on to dvd and they will to HD DVD/BR.

"Besides, take a video card with a DVI out into your HDTV using H.264 AVC at 1080i/720p, and you cant tell the difference from a BD/HD DVD disc. I didnt believe it either until I seen it with my own eyes."

I'm not surprised - they are both MPEG4.

Steve

"The previous poster compared HD DVD/BR to laserdisc when it clearly is not in the same niche category or costs $50+ each like laserdiscs often did. He then suggested that the setup process is not only difficult for experts but clearly too complicated for your average consumer. It isn't. People caught on to dvd and they will to HD DVD/BR."

I said that HD/BD will join Laserdisc in the dustbin of good technology killed by bad implementation.

I suggested nothing - I was restating what the experts in the field were experiencing and writing about.

Walk into any Best Buy or other mid-range consumer shopping port and you will see a lot of HD televisions showing uprezzed SD DVD's or satellite HD on sports. If you can find the Blu-Ray DVD display, it will be off in another corner of the store. Ask a sales clerk about HD or Blu Ray discs and I'll bet a lunch that the recommendation will be toward an SD DVD with uprez. There's just no consumer push for HD-DVD or Blu Ray DVD.

The "good enough" factor alone will keep the HD/BD in the niche of the early adopters and the technogeeks. The average consumer just doesn't see any reason to replace their DVD player, and if they do, it will be for an uprez-SD player - for hundreds of dollars less.

The situation 6 months into HD DVD/Blu-ray is far better than the situation DVD was in 6 months into its launch. It took over three years for DVD to become remotely mainstream and about 6-7 years to surpass VHS. I purchased my first DVD player in 1999, 2 years after its launch, and I was the first person I knew to get one.

Laserdisc didn't succeed in the mainstream because it was overpriced and not practical. My E.T. boxset had the movie spaced out on 5 sides of giant 12 inch discs. The cost was great and the quality was that of a non-anamorphic DVD. It just wasn't practical for your average consumer.

Your average consumer has just got a taste of HD. They are just now purchasing HDTVs and just now seeing HD in there own homes via cable or satellite. DVD has been "good enough" but it won't be after Joe Six Pack gets used to HD. Do you really imagine DVD will still be the standard 10 years from now? If it isn't what will be? If not HD-DVD or Blu-ray what will it be? EVD? Holographic? The studios will never align behind EVD and holographic has yet to be realized.

So I truely believe HD-DVD and/or Blu-ray will be the heir apparent to DVD. Between the two, there is full studio support. HD-DVD/Blu-ray is just as practical as DVD. It took DVD players 2 1/2 years to reach the price point that HD-DVD has reached in 6 months!

Put a timeline on your prediction and I'll bet a dinner on mine.

Steve M.

Here's a slightly different view of this:

Alternative I:
I buy a HD-DVD home theater player for $350 and hook it up to my HDTV. I rent any of the current 160 or so Netflix movies in this format for no more than regular DVDs, so no increase in cost whatsoever, I still pay only $19.99/month for 3 at a time.

If I want to play a regular DVD, this player also upscales it very decently.

(Cheapskates can even hook up a $200 Xbox HD-DVD player to a PC, I consider that desperate. Purpose-built home theater stuff is nicer.)

Alternative II:
I spend $99 to buy a Sony DVP-NS75H top rated upscaling DVD player and watch all movies from Netflix or my local video store in something absolutely amazingly close to real HD.

I have lived with Alt. II for three weeks so far, with great satisfaction, and am now thinking about Alt. I also, after suddenly seeing how many HD-DVD titles Netflix has (they also have 47 Blu-Ray titles, which probably represents all released, and I'd have to pay $850 for the cheapest player).

Note that the Sony player above only upscales astonishingly over the HDMI output, but if you can use that, you get a jawdropping picture.

It also has a good remote with slow/fast play with sound, and more.

You seem to be missing the big picture. What works for you or me is not going to drive the average consumer. There's nothing compelling the average consumer to go the extra few hundred dollars for HD or BD players when most of them can't see the difference from HD and SD-Uprezzed.

And the retailers aren't making it easier when every one that I've seen are showing SD uprezzed on their HDTV displays. On the rare ocassion that I see a real HD playing, it's a DivX-HD or WMV-HD disc on an Avel Pro HD player. Only once have I seen a demo of a blu-ray disc on a blu-ray player in a store. It looked worse than any of the uprezzed SD and it was a small "end-cap" display at the end of the DVD counter. If the message that Best Buy was sending is to not buy the new formats, it was working.

Steve Mann

Don't go to Best Buy, they are incompetent.

Circuit City seems to be the new star, at least here in L.A. Very competent display of everything from uprezzing all the way to real 1080P Blu-Ray on large flat screens in "real home environments."

Most of their screens are showing 1080i HDTV content from satellite or cable, some from special boxes.

Those "special boxes" probably contain an Avel Pro HD DivX-HD player.