Blue Blu-ray

TopSpin writes "Early this year the meme circulated that Blu-ray might be going the way of Betamax, and for the exact same reason: Sony's unfriendliness to the porn industry. But at Japan's recent euphemistically named Adult Treasure Expo 2007, adult filmmakers said Sony has begun offering technical support, and this was later confirmed by Sony PR. The company stated that Sony would offer support to any filmmaker working on the format, no matter their industry. Apparently, Blu-ray is now the preferred medium for Japanese adult films."

Any consensus?

Is there any consensus in the geek community about which format is liked best?

Re:Any consensus?

Normal DVD- cracked DRM, and most people still don't have HD.

Re:Any consensus?

Who wants H.D. pr0n? Do you really want to see cellulite, open pores, wrinkles, etc. all in high-def? You'll end up wishing porn really did make you go blind.

Hi-def makes it much harder to fulfill people's fantasies with real-life actors. Even the producers are complaining about it.

Re:Any consensus?

Who wants H.D. pr0n? Do you really want to see cellulite, open pores, wrinkles, etc. all in high-def? You'll end up wishing porn really did make you go blind. Hi-def makes it much harder to fulfill people's fantasies with real-life actors. Even the producers are complaining about it.

I demand a sample to assess the veracity of this claim.

Re:Any consensus?

Let me know when you've got a 50-70" widescreen TV.

It has nothing to do with extreme detail, it has to do with making giant TVs look just as sharp as your 20" TV... stretching a picture made for a small TV (SD) onto a large TV (HD) looks like shit.

Re:Any consensus?

Great, as if hentai tentacle rape wasn't detailed enough...

Re:Any consensus?

whichever the japanese adult filmmakers choose is fine by me.

Re:Any consensus?

Which brings up a good question. Back in the 80s?? when the VHS-Betamax war was raging, there wasn't many ways to get porn. You could either buy magazines, which were just pictures, or you could buy video cassettes. Now we have the internet. With all the pay-for and free porn on the internet, I think that buying porn in a brick and mortar store will disappear pretty fast. I don't think that porn availability will be the deciding factor in which format wins this time around, because most of the people who are up-and-up on technology, who will be buying the new HD disc players are on the internet, and getting their porn from there.

Re:Any consensus?

Meh. To me, it comes down to:

• How much a burner costs
• How much the media costs
• How many commercial players will support burned movies of format x

Re:Any consensus?

The preferred format for the geek community is "teen girl". It will never quite completely erase the "big breast" format, though.

Hybrid

Suit yourself. I'll get myself the "Teen Girl" / "Big Breast" hybrid model.

It may cost a bit more, I don't have to worry about choosing the wrong format.

Blu-kake

Those crazy Japanese!!!

The Swing Content

The porn industry is perfectly capable of going both ways... and a few others besides.

Am I the only one who just doesn't care about HD?

I really don't care for the HD craze, I still buy plain old DVDs. Am I really in the minority?

I want storage, not HD.

I don't care a bit about the video capabilities.

I just want the gigabytes of storage. Inexpensive burners + inexpensive disks and I'll be happier.

Porn is irrelevant

Porn is not going to decide HD formats. I don't know why this idiotic meme keeps springing up. Sure it may have had an impact on beta vs VHS where porn-friendly VHS offered an alternative to going to some sleazy porno theatre. But those days have past. Porn is readily and discretely available from thousands of internet sites, satellite, and conventional formats. The impact of some format supporting or not supporting porn is fairly low. Besides, there are Blu Ray porn titles if you really want your razor rash in HD so the whole argument is moot.

Urban legends

The original meme was wrong in the first place. Some people took an article that said that Sony would not press porn blu-ray disks, got confused, and announced that Sony wasn't going to allow porn on blu-ray. This was never the case. They never said they wouldn't license it for other people to press porn on blu-ray.

This was all said at the time, of course, but people were more interested in being clever and announcing blu-ray's demise than actually researching the matter.

Porn never mattered in this war

For DVD and VHS, porn was a huge deal because it was difficult to obtain discreetly otherwise.

But nowadays any kind of porn you can imagine, and many kinds you would rather not, are all online. Porn media sales are nothing now compared with total video sales. So even though Blu-Ray is getting more and more backing from adult studios, it will not really have any effect.

On a side note though Japan and the US are in the same region with Blu-Ray, so Anime or other titles (such as this adult studio stuff) can all be imported directly. I'm just hoping most anime comes with English subtitles even just for Japanese release...

Re:Difference?

"I believe hd-dvd is on the order of 15-20gb, where a blu-ray disc is 50-60gb. So the blu-ray disc can hold the same length movie, with less compression, and as a result ( theortically ) a better image."

HD DVD is 15GB (I have no idea what a gb is) per layer. Blu-Ray is 25GB per layer. Both can come in dual layer formats and so HD DVD can have up to 30GB and Blu-Ray 50GB. Both support exactly the same video and audio codecs and also AACS DRM although Blu-Ray has an additional layer of encryption which HD DVD lacks although it hasn't be used yet. Blu-Ray is also region encoded whereas HD DVD isn't so you can buy your discs from anywhere in the world if you buy them on HD DVD but you can only buy them within your own region if you buy Blu-Ray.

Picture quality wise there is nothing in it. In all the tests so far, HD DVD has been equal or better where the film is available on both formats. Truth is, a 1080p HD signal can easily fit into 30GB using VC-1. A number of Blu-Ray discs are still using MPEG2 which is less efficient and is why they don't look as good as the HD DVD VC-1 equivalent.

In the end, the technical differences are small enough not to make the slightest difference. Physically, the discs are the same dimensions and a combi drive is practical so there is no reason to believe that a cheap multiformat player won't exist. Samsung is supposed to be releasing their DVD/HD DVD/Blu-Ray combi player in europe for 400 shortly and it will support all formats fully.

Personally, I bought an HD DVD drive for my Xbox 360 so I would have some HD material for my HD TV and HD projector. For the money I would have been daft not to and there were enough films on the format to get me started. Even today, there is little to choose between HD DVD and Blu-Ray when it comes to choice of films. Compared with DVD, HD DVD is definitely clearer and has richer colours and deeper blacks. I have an upscaling HDMI DVD player which helps make DVD look very good, but HD DVD is definitely better. When the combi player becomes available I will buy one and use that instead of my Xbox 360 and also have the option of Blu-Ray.

Re:Difference?

Personally, I bought an HD DVD drive for my Xbox 360 so I would have some HD material for my HD TV and HD projector.

You should definitely look into getting an antenna hooked up to pull down some over-the-air HD programming. I thought I'd need some mega-huge antenna to get a signal because I live in a rural area, but I was able to use a powered rabbit ear antenna and I can get the five or six stations that broadcast near me. It looks really good, too. Saturday baseball on Fox is a highlight of the week for me now, because of the increased clarity and the wide screen view. You can see a lot more of the action. You might already know about OTA reception, but I'm surprised how many of my friends bought really nice HDTVs and are just using analog cable or analog broadcast TV.

Re:Difference?

Um...in case you haven't been to a consumer electronics store in the last six months, there are more 3rd party Blu-Ray players than there are HD-DVD players total. Unlike Betamax, this isn't a Sony-only product.

Re:Difference?

The difference is that nobody has any idea what the difference is between DVD-R and DVD+R.

The difference is very clear, when you think about it. See, one is negative, the other is positive. So you use DVD-R to store emo songs, drama movies, professional images, and war-themed 3D shooters; and use DVD+R to store pop-rock songs, comedies, funny cat pics, and 2D platformers.

Blue Laws of the Colony of Connecticut

I thought it came from the term blue law [wikipedia.org], which is any law designed to enforce a moral standard. I believe that term derives from the original Blue Laws [wikipedia.org] of the Colony of Connecticut.

WHich is why Blu-Ray is winning

Toshiba is the ONLY hardware maker for HD-DVD drives.

On the Blu-Ray side, you have players from Sony and Panasonic and Samsung and others (soon to be Funai players as well, the producer of the dirt-cheap DVD players for WalMart).

Sony learned well the lessons of betamax (also including have the format with more storage, and more studio backing). It's a shame the HD-DVD backers didn't bother to examine history to see where they were headed.

Re:No preferred media for me.

Last I heard, the Internet is not there yet. Seriously. I heard an analysis on the Digital Production Buzz that distribution of a top selling movies like Cars or Shrek is not possible with the current backbones that's available, where the amount of data on plastic & aluminum discs of the sales of just ONE movie in the first week of sales exceeded the aggregate backbone capacity several fold for the same period on the Internet. And lots of new movies are released every week.

A better codec will shrink that down, but you aren't going to cut it down by more than half without losing picture quality. I really love how HD movies look, 1080p movies on a 1080p large projected screen is exceedingly nice. I'm not going to like anything that's bitrate starved to save on bandwidth. Disney's Pirates of the Carribean regularly exceeded 20Mbps, and that was with H.264 AVC.

The *real* next-generation media is when there is no media at all.

I think "next" generation kind of falls apart here, it really applies to both HD discs and internet downloads, though I Internet movies to be the final victor in the long run. I expect that there will be DVD, HD disc and internet streaming & downloads (with several formats within that) to coexist for some time.