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Toshiba Execs Declare HD DVD Not Dead Yet
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Jan 07, 2008 01:04 AM
from the they're-doing-science-and-they're-still-alive dept.
from the they're-doing-science-and-they're-still-alive dept.
Lucas123 writes "HD DVD proponent Toshiba remains defiant that its format will not succumb to the mounting tsunami of support for Blu-ray Discs. Akio Ozaka, head of Toshiba America Consumer Products, said at CES today that he was surprised by Warner's decision." It should also be noted that the HD DVD group has cancelled many of their meetings at CES.
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Games: Warner Backs Blu-Ray. End Times For HD-DVD? 705 comments
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times reports: In addition to Apple, Warner Brothers is now going to throw its weight behind the Blu-ray format for high-definition disks. Warner has been the only major studio to publish its movies in both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. Today, the studio announced that from now on, it would only issue movies in Blu-ray.
Richard Greenfield, the media analyst with Pali Research, wrote that this marks the end of the format wars: "We expect HD DVD to 'die' a quick death.""
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It's only MOSTLY dead. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's only MOSTLY dead. (Score:5, Funny)
Not dead yet: Toshiba execs standing there with stopwatches saying "Wait for it... wait for it..."
Re:It's only MOSTLY dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
It ain't over till the fat lady sings... (Score:5, Funny)
Pissed off consumers (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice, so, all the people that spent $$$$ on some HD-DVD player or Xbox attachment are going to be mighty pissed off, as they have once again, fallen into what I call the High-Def money pit, where you have to constantly buy some new gizmo because the holders of the DRM willy nilly decide to change things.
How many TVs were sold as HD-ready, only to not be? How many 720p sets or even 1080i sets still don't have an HDMI connection? And let's not even get into Vista Media Center, or any of the other depricated formats that have lead to technological dead-ends and/or having to re-buy the same media all over again (MLB, anyone?)...
If I had been stupid enough to even join in the HD revolution, I'd be pissed off enough to start suing every company that dropped the ball. I'd start with demanding my money back, and when they refused, I'd start throwing lawyers into the mix.
I can't decide who's going to be marching on corporate america first with torches and pitchforks -- the early-adopters of HD, or those screwed out of TV when we switch to digital in Feb of 2009.
Either way there are going to be some demanding their pound of flesh. I just want to sit back and watch the whole thing -- in regular NTSC of course, because regular TV is good enough when you consider the content available.
TTYL
The new HD-DVD meme. Not easy nor cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay attention everyone, this is the new meme that all the cool HD kids are spreading now in some kind of bizarre "Scorched Earth" strategy meant to destroy both formats, after all Sony must die right?
Well lets think about both your arguments:
1) Easier. To play HD content from a disc I just place a disc in a player, and it's playing. To get HD content online I have to decide to buy it from somewhere (and have an internet connection to my system at the TV). Then I have to wait for it to buffer enough to start watching. And then I have to watch a greatly compressed video/audio experience that makes buying a decent HD set a waste. Or I can go for a torrent, and spend days downloading a full quality mvoie only risking many thousands of dollars in fines if a torrent that I must leave up for days on end is discovered. If I downloaded the content legally and want to share it with a friend I can't do that. If I downloaded it legally I load them a hard drive (!). If I have physical media, I just loan them a disc (unless - sweet irony! I have a BD burner and they have a BD-ROM, in which case I can burn a disc).
How was that easier?
2) Cheaper. Yes free is certainly cheap, though of dubious ethical value. Online downloads? Cheap indeed but either they are (a) very cheap and the media expires shortly, or (b) actually rather expensive for the same non-portable highly compressed content I mentioned before. And in the meantime I can rent Blu-Ray discs from Netflix more cheaply than any online service, and probably get them faster than a torrent and cheaper than legal online HD media.
Toshiba should avenge the HD-DVD by reinventing it (Score:5, Interesting)
This will allow cheap HD-DVD devices and disks to be made in China and dumped into the US market. These will be used by people wanting to rip, burn, and trade the BlueRay DVDs available in the market. That would be sweet revenge
There is a huge market potential for HD-DVD in backups.
-anandsr
Re:Endless recreations of the Dead Parrot Sketch (Score:5, Funny)
Toshiba declares that HD-DVD feels happy, would like to go for a walk.
Black Knight, anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:porn is blue ray is it not? (Score:5, Funny)
Just don't use a blacklight, you'll never know what you'll find.
Re:porn is blue ray is it not? (Score:5, Funny)
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must address a popup window about squirting teens.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Informative)
How would they demand that? Microsoft simply does not care about HD-DVD enough to risk tanking it's game console like Sony did (by forcing the price up for something that doesn't actually help games).
War would have ended if HD-DVD shipped in Elite (Score:5, Interesting)
That move would have won the format war outright.
A little less clear, but I feel just as certain victory would have Microsoft include HD-DVD with the Elite model. That would have been around the time of the Paramount switch, and the momentum of those two moves would have fed off each other to spook people away from Blu-Ray and probably get either Fox or Disney to go neutral in teh same way the Warner move has spooked people off HD-DVD and probably is forcing retailers and consumers to support Blu-Ray exclusively very soon.. It's not like you can really argue at that point it would have made the 360 cost prohibitive since it would only be on the top-line model anyway.
Just as Sony won the format war through costly initial action, so Microsoft helped destroy HD-DVD through penny-pinching inaction. I guess Toshiba should have tried to wire the HD-DVD contract with the Three Laws of HD-DVD media.
Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
Doubtful. But it would certainly have subjected the 360 to the same cost and time overruns that the PS3 suffered from.
No-one would argue that much of the 360's current success is due to it launching a year earlier with a cheaper price. Making the HD disc player optional might (in the long run) make it harder for devs to squeeze large games in, but definitely kept the console cheaper and simpler for the so-crucial first couple of years of its life.
As for putting it in the Elite, its sales weren't large enough to make much difference to Toshiba, and increasing the cost would not have helped that. Armchair analysts can call it "penny pinching", but in the world of business, the user always pays in the end. Sony's decision to sacrifice their Playstation brand on the altar of Blu-Ray success has cost them dearly [variety.com], at least in the short term.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
I like the part where you complain about fanboyism, and then immediately start going into wild speculation about "divx-like lockdowns and timed rentals", then follow that up with complaints of "selective buyouts" that both sides were doing.
Frankly, I'm just glad the whole thing's over, so that hopefully the burners will start getting more common/cheaper.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
Buying a Big Mac isn't obligatory, but when I do I pay tax on it. It still is tax.
Blu-ray comes with a significant price premium -- for both technical and licensing reasons -- over HD-DVD. Add the value of combo discs that you can get for HD-DVD, but not Blu-ray, and the average household either has to upgrade wholesale at once (have fun getting a blu-ray player for the SUV), or buy all media twice.
Blu-ray is a much more expensive proposition for exactly the same end result.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pro-HD DVD myself, but this "Sony vs Microsoft" or "Sony vs Toshiba" crap has to end.
Sony was the largest backer of Blu-ray and was involved in its early development. But Blu-ray is a format controlled by a wide consortium of interests, of which Sony is a small player. Blu-ray was designed to appeal to studios, and to some extent, it does more than HD-DVD: Studios want region encoding, they want (however moronic it might be) 1980s software style copy prevention schemes (which, effectively, is what BD+ allows them to do. Make your discs faulty and then write Java code to make the player ignore the faults. Wow. That worked really well back when Woz was building disk drives...), and they don't want to be forced to sell anything other than a disc. HD DVD appealed to consumers. It's designed to be reliable at the expense of the discs being easier to copy. It's not region encoded. And it made managed copy a mandatory feature.
These feature collections have nothing to do with promoting Sony, Microsoft, or Toshiba, and there's pretty much no way any of these three companies could suddenly start dictating terms to the studios if the format they've nailed their colours to succeeds.
So can we stop using Sony as a reason to attack Blu-ray?
Re:blueray hd dvd? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:blueray hd dvd? (Score:5, Informative)
From what I hear, that coating on Blu-ray is very good [highdefdigest.com].
As an HD-DVD developer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. I thought so too, but in practice, HD-DVD wins. (And I'm not just saying this because of my job; for all I know, our company will be forced into Blu-Ray, or something completely different.)
What Blu-Ray has going for it (other than this latest blow) is capacity and bandwidth, and a ton of empty promises about features which are mostly not implemented. And capacity, at least, was rumored to be about killed by some triple-layer HD-DVD format, which would beat dual-layer Blu-Ray by a gig.
What HD-DVD has (had?) is price and features. Since people are pronouncing the format dead, I think I'm entitled to one last rant -- I am an HD-DVD developer.
So here's how it breaks down: Blu-Ray requires entirely new equipment to press. HD-DVD can modify existing DVD equipment. There have also been (barely) sub-$100 HD-DVD players at some point -- that's yet to happen for Blu-Ray, cheapest I've seen is a $200 drive (not a standalone player).
The price of the discs is mostly irrelevant, as now is really not the time to be buying discs to keep. But I would expect them to be cheaper, and there was also the strange run of dual-format (HD-DVD and standard DVD) discs -- literally two-sided, side A for HD, side B for DVD.
Now, as to the actual technologies... Note that I have not actually seen a Blu-Ray disc play, so all of this is from what I've heard my co-workers say, and I don't remember it incredibly well. But the HD-DVD information should be dead accurate.
To start with, Blu-Ray requires AACS, and supports region coding and something called "BD-Mark". Meanwhile, HD-DVD has optional AACS (though some features are inaccessible to unencrypted discs), and does not support region coding. So even if you hate Microsoft, as a geek, you really want HD-DVD to win, for that reason.
It also supports standard dual-layer DVDs as a medium. Same HD content, good codecs (VC1, h.264, etc), scripting, but if it fits in 9 gigs, you can burn it to a cheaper disc. I don't know if it actually supports single-layer DVDs (though I imagine it does), or CDs (though I doubt it). So, low-capacity all the way up to the proposed triple-layer makes it more flexible than Blu-Ray in terms of disc format.
Blu-Ray is Java. HD-DVD is JavaScript. Having used both languages, I'm amazed anyone would argue for Java, but people do. And it almost seemed logical -- I expected the Java to be faster, but it's not.
Let that sink in a moment. In the actual, real-world use, any Blu-Ray player other than the PS3 is slow as hell with simple menu animations. By "slow as hell", I mean you will actually see it redrawing each frame in blocks, for a tiny menu taking up maybe an eighth of the screen. HD-DVD, on the other hand... Well, I can make it slow, but not that slow. Half-second animations that take up half the screen are, at worst, a little jerky, but never do you see it redrawing in chunks like that.
Now, just guessing, but I suspect that Blu-Ray hands over more control to the Java itself -- that is, it is actual Java code doing those animations. Not so with HD-DVD -- I just tell it to change some property (x, y, width, height, opacity, etc) by some amount over some duration, and let the player handle the rest -- probably with native code, probably a good chunk of it in video hardware.
And, from what I've heard through the grapevine, Warner's actual tech people agree with me -- they'd much rather work with HD-DVD and with JavaScript. So this smells like an executive decision, made for strategic reasons, not technical ones, and certainly not with the consumer in mind.
HD-DVD also has a much stronger base of what's required. Even in those sub-$100 players, you get:
Cheaper already, and you forget about Deep Color.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since many millions more discs have been pressed in Blu-Ray (thanks to PS3 games) the production costs have dropped substantially. And the consumer only sees movie prices which have remained identical between the two formats.
more for the drives
Sony just announced a $200 PC BD-ROM. How much are HD-DVD ROM's again? Scale shows advantage once again.
and it natively supports region locking and other consumer nightmares.
Most titles do not use the region controls, and there are fewer regions than DVD had - which means greater, not lesser, consumer acceptance of the format on region bounds.
Plus, the storage capacity of HD-DVD (the other thing commonly touted as it's inferiority) is more than plenty for 1K HD content,
Not if you also want lossless audio, or have a longer movie with a lot of detail. Then you have to make sacrifices. You've also forgotten that this is the year some systems will start to support Deep Color in HDMI 1.3, and we'll start to see movies support that as well. A greater bit-depth for color requires more space.
You go pick which is more important to you.
As an engineer it has always seemed pretty obvious to me.
Re:Most Blu-Ray discs region free (Score:5, Insightful)
>in the UK) are region free on Blu-Ray as well.
Yes, now they are, when they are "fighting" versus HD DVD. But who knows about the future and when there is only Blu-ray?
>It's more widely understood by studios that region coding is
>not as good for sales, they only use it for regional control now.
So how come most DVD still have region coding?