HD AND Blue-Ray

TaranT · Post by **TaranT** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 12:14 am

Looks like we're going to get both:

Mainichi Daily News wrote:Two groups of Japanese major electronics companies have abandoned unifying their standards for next-generation DVDs, industry sources said Tuesday.

A group led by Toshiba Corp. and the other comprising of Sony Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., among other firms, have failed to reach agreement on the standards for their larger-capacity, next-generation DVDs.

As a result, DVD systems with two incompatible standards will coexist, like VHS and Beta systems for videotape recorders, which will inconvenience consumers.

source

bum · Post by **bum** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 8:26 am

Honestly, MEH. I'd prefer they just used dvds and made them cheaper. DVD9's are still prohibitively expensive.

jbone · Post by **jbone** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 7:41 pm

bum wrote:Honestly, MEH. I'd prefer they just used dvds and made them cheaper. DVD9's are still prohibitively expensive.

Considering the American market probably won't accept both, either one will be accepted as the standard, or you'll get to keep your DVDs because neither new standard will sell.

SpringBoy · Post by **SpringBoy** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 12:01 pm

There's a few differences between this and the VHS/Beta war.

- Hollywood studios are almost equally divided on which format they will release titles in. Which means that you might have to use both if you want to watch all your movies in HD.

- It's actually possible to make players that support both. I believe Pioneer has already done it. Thus the end user will not care which they use if they know they can play it.

Personally, I'm amazed that they couldn't agree on a combined format. If they'd gotten it right from the start then we wouldn't have to come up with another high capacity format in 3-5 years time.

However this goes down, you can be sure that plain DVDs will still be around for quite some time.

Kalium · Post by **Kalium** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 8:18 pm

History indicates that, in all honesty, format wars tend to be decided by the porn industry. Really.

Anyway, the DRM is going to be horrible either way. Whether the lion kills the bear, or the bear the lion, the trapped rabbit is still screwed.

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 8:56 pm

Kalium wrote:Anyway, the DRM is going to be horrible either way. Whether the lion kills the bear, or the bear the lion, the trapped rabbit is still screwed.

Of course, they pretty much had to offer it to get the support of the movie studios in the first place, right?

Zatoichi00 · Post by **Zatoichi00** » Sat Sep 03, 2005 5:52 pm

Blu-Ray is the better technology.

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Sat Sep 03, 2005 5:57 pm

Zatoichi00 wrote:Blu-Ray is the better technology.

Sony already has plenty of experience with better technology. If better technology always won, we wouldn't all be watching VHS cassettes.

badmartialarts · Post by **badmartialarts** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 3:36 am

And man, do they look at you funny at Blockbuster when you request LDs or Betamax cassettes....

the Black Monarch · Post by **the Black Monarch** » Wed Nov 02, 2005 3:26 am

Call me crazy, but when DVDs are already encoded with so much goddamn mosquito noise and compression artificing, I think upping the bitrate (Blue-ray) at the same resolution is a better idea than quadrupling the resolution (HD) at the same bitrate.

Also, Blue-Ray DVD-Rs will kick so much ass