Gizmodo Declares Blu-Ray Winner 242
13.7BillionYears writes "Gizmodo has a special feature covering the many details of the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle based on the technical, financial, and commercial merits of the two contenders. They conclude that Blu-Ray is the clear winner on all three fronts. Hopefully the movie industry and electronics manufacturers will see the same logic and avert a format war."
Dial back the bias a little bit (Score:5, Insightful)
GOOD (Score:5, Insightful)
As an American Slob(tm), I have a really slack attitude towards my optical media. Mostly due to how I can get away with it with everything else.
Re:Dial back the bias a little bit (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm happy to know that Blu-Ray is a great format (and it really does appear to be a good format), but let's be somewhat objective here.
The masses will ultimately decicde who wins (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:RTFA, even if it gets Slashdotted (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The masses will ultimately decicde who wins (Score:2, Insightful)
VHS vs. Beta, anyone?
(oh God, here we go again...)
My worry is... (Score:4, Insightful)
So why dump the cartridges?
Re:Dial back the bias a little bit (Score:2, Insightful)
Gizmodo, from the makers of Fleshbot and Wonkette. (Score:4, Insightful)
Which codec will be used for HD-DVDs? (Score:2, Insightful)
And does anyone with a preview release of Tiger have any information on how fast it codecs a file?
Here's the Trick (Score:4, Insightful)
The only people who won't like this are the people who are supporting the other standard, you know DVD-whats_its_name, you know- the losers.
Which will win...pirates may decide (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reading comprehension (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot! From a marketing standpoint (as if there were any other when dealing with manufacturers) the last thing they want is to have their brand name associated with discs which are rendered useless as soon as you get a fingerprint on them. (Not saying that Blu-ray is this sensitive, just making a point).
Re:Dual Compatability? (Score:5, Insightful)
This multiple format business is a mess. Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them (and if the music industry stopped suing people and promoted those formats that are so much better than downloaded music they would actually make more money because there is new value there.)
But back to the topic at hand: The industry would benefit more from having ONE SINGLE TRUE UNIFIED STANDARD as opposed to a couple of standards, which would confuse people. The public at large (Joe Sixpack) gets all confused with this 2-format thing. They want to buy a movie and play it, not worry about if this disc will play on their type of player. When we have one unified standard, confusion is reduced, people cam just buy buy buy and made the industry happy. The the industry focus can be put on actually releasing content and worthwhile stuff, as opposed to teaching consumers that they need a different player for their Fox releases versus some other studio and then wondering why people don't buy any of these confusing and conflicting products.
Dear next-gen disc industry: ONE STANDARD PLEASE!
Re:Dial back the bias a little bit (Score:5, Insightful)
Blu Ray Wins (cause we already said so)
Technical
Blu Ray has larger capacity
Blu Ray doesn't have backwards compatability, but thats a feature not a weakness!
Blu Ray may have a lower production cost, we don't know for sure, but thats still a plus for Blu Ray
Neither Blu Ray or the other one (we try not to mention the losers name) are going to use catridges. Point for Blu Ray
Financial
Blu Ray group has 70 members, the HD DVD forum has 220 members, but we saw this poster somewhere that only had 47 companies in support of HD DVD. So Blu Ray wins!
The economic size of the Blu Ray members is bigger. Except for Microsoft. But you know. Microsoft may change its mind and support Blu Ray. Blu Ray wins this one as well! Wow go Blu Ray!
Commerical
Blu Ray has 30% of the commerical resellers market! HD DVD has 0%! It is quite obvious that the 70% currently undecided will chose Blu Ray, because we said it won already!
Seriously, this article is not worth slashdot. It isn't worth anything.
Actually that could be OK. (Score:5, Insightful)
But in fact a funny point sis that durability could be a major strike AGAINST HD-DVD. Did you read the part about Blu-Ray discs printed on paper? That could mean a lot more opportunity for throw-away discs in magazines or cerial boxes or wheverer. That is a huge draw to media types, to be able to push media through more channels.
So again, I would say the duribility of the format has nothing to do with sucess. Ease of use, yes - to some extent (which is why they aren't giving any cart-based players to the masses). The primary factor will be the one with a majority of media companies getting behind it and making things people want to buy. If there were a split between some media supporting one format, and some another, then there might be more of a fight - but it looks to be an absolute domination the part of Blu-Ray, as they said from any standpoint you care to look that would indicate future sales potential.
Porn industry will decide the winner (Score:3, Insightful)
50GB of Jenna Jameson...WOW!!
Re:W00T! (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortunately the wonderful thing about DVDs being a fully digital and cracked medium is that it will be very easy to copy them over to BluDisc-R whenever that becomes a commodity product.
Re:Here's the Trick (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of just blindly going with one format over another, how about we see how these maturing technology standards develop and then make an INFORMED DECISION based on how they actually work. Agreed, consumers don't want to go through VHS/Beta again and neither do the manufacturers. There's more to it than jumping on the nearest bandwagon.
I lost my sig.
Re:Reading comprehension (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. Media damage is about the only thing I don't like about current DVDs. I have about 200 Music CDs (and my wife has about as many) and can't really recall any problems with playback. Where as I have an episode of Sex and the City on DVD that I didn't even get to watch because of the smallest scracth that I can barely see. I've also checked out DVDs from the library that were unwatchable. My personal experience leads me to believe that we need media that can handle media damage better.
Re:Reading comprehension (Score:3, Insightful)
--
Evan
Which one's cheaper to produce (Score:3, Insightful)
Wildest optimism (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes you think the movie industry will see logic? They haven't been too hot on it before...
Re:Dial back the bias a little bit (Score:2, Insightful)
Most people (including myself) wouldn't know what Blu-Ray is. Many initial adopters will buy it just because it's the latest and greatest and wouldn't take the time to research their format options. As far as they are concerned, HD-DVD is high definition DVD and you can't get any better then that.
why are they all the CD-sized? (Score:3, Insightful)
Soon we'll have three or four 120mm discs. Why not make the Blu-Rays a little wider, so there's no chance of them being inserted into a non-Blu-Ray device? (and the side benefit of a few more tracks == more space) Backward compatibility would be maintained, of course.
Is it just because it's cheaper to reuse some of the manufacturing equipment from the CD assembly lines?
Re:Go beta! (Score:4, Insightful)
MD was pretty much DOA due to Sony licensing and pricing for licensing. Not to mention that Sony is it's own worst enemy and kept the MD as "audio only" (there was no way to get digital content on/off the drive).
Just like we saw with the "floppy killer" drives that were all 40-250MB in size. Nobody was willing to step up and publish an open standard, so none of the half a dozen formats every took off.
So here we are, 10 years later, and we're still using floppy discs as the easiest way to move a 50k document from machine A to machine B. (USB keys are getting close... but still an order of magnitude too expensive, and unplugging a drive can be problematic.)
The movie industry (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Dial back the bias a little bit (Score:3, Insightful)
Rather than mandating one particular standard, they made the fatal decision of "let the marketplace decide."
So you saw different AM stereo (all incompatible) formats being deployed accross the country.
Needles to say, am stereo has never caught on.
And in recent years, AM radio consists mostly of talk radio and sports, which really do not require stereo.
Who would want to listen to Rush Limbaugh in stereo? -shudder-
Re:why are they all the CD-sized? (Score:3, Insightful)
One obvious advantage is that the BluRay drives will be able to play CD's and regular DVD's using the same tray and drive mechanism.
Now, you could have an 'inner' tray like the current one for 3" CDs but those never really took off. I think it's probably a perception-problem, people aren't comfortable placing a smaller disc into a large player.
Secondly, everyone retains their investment in CD towers, holders, etc.
Nowhere did I see discussion on Apple & HD-DVD (Score:2, Insightful)
And another thing, nice to see another fight between MS & Apple with BR & HD-DVD.
Re:My worry is... (Score:3, Insightful)
The canned response is that the discs are actually "safer" because there's a whole lot more room for error correction and redundancy. It's that simple.
Re:My worry is... (Score:2, Insightful)
if the redundant copy or parity is stored physically near the primary data it's likely to be taken out by the same scratch...and if it's not then you have a real potential performance problem seeking back and forth etc.
Not seeking but just waiting. CD-ROM spreads each sector's erasure correction code across several degrees of rotation. It can easily error-correct across a radial scratch (one going from inside to outside) but has a hard time with concentric scratches (those going around the spiral), which is why you're supposed to clean CDs using an in-and-out motion. I'd imagine that DVD, Blu-ray, and UMD media have much the same properties.