HD DVD Demo a Disappointment

triso writes to tell us that the recent unveiling of the new Toshiba HD DVD production model met with a few difficulties. From the article: "It was supposed to be the grand unveiling of a new generation in home entertainment when Kevin Collins of Microsoft Corp. popped an HD DVD disc into a Toshiba production model and hit 'play.' Nothing happened. The failed product demo at this week's International Consumer Electronics Show was hardly an auspicious start for the HD DVD camp in what's promising to be a nasty format war similar to the Betamax/VHS video tape battle."

Well

[by Anonymous Coward]

So what? A failed demo is nothing to laugh at. I mean they probably has a slight bug, that shouldn't be a sign that the format is totally screwed. Give them a break!

Re:Well

[insertwackynamehere (891357)]

yeah and when I set up the video in English class and the stupid public school VCRs dont work, I'm the one who has to explain it and people don't like hearing about faulty equipment. It's just "w/e I guess you couldn't set up the tape" not in a mean way, but its a "you couldn't set up the tape" even when it's not really your fault.

Shows what you know........

[ConsumerOfMany (942944)]

Tthis is not a failed demo. Even the Toshiba executives cant get around their new DRM technology.

warning: insufficient license

[adpowers (153922)]

Exactly :). The system detected that more than five people were in the room, necessitating an upgrade of the license from "Family Viewing" to "Public Performance".

Re:Well

[amazon10x (737466)]

Sure... I mean, look at the glitch MS had when demoing Windows 95; we all know that was in no way representative of the final product.

Re:Well

[VGPowerlord (621254)]

I think you mean Windows 98 [cnn.com].

Re:Well

[mstefanus (705346)]

It was Win 98 actually. & parent should be modded Funny, not Insightful.

Re:Well

[TheoMurpse (729043)]

As an aside, we really should be supporting HD-DVD on the basis of it being lesser of 2 DRM evils.

Or perhaps we should boycott both. I'd prefer that; this gives us an easy way to get out of the endless upgrade-trytouse-getfucked-upgrade-trytouse-getfuc ked cycle that content providers have been trying to force down the customers' throats for years.

Laugh, its funny.

[nurb432 (527695)]

Sure its something to laugh at. Laughing at a screw up isnt some evil attack on them personally..

If you cant see the humor in a failed demo, or 'take a joke', then you are in the wrong business.

Re:Well

[HiThere (15173)]

But you know, I'm still not going to buy anything from Sony. I may not buy from Toshiba either, I haven't decided yet, buy Sony is going to need to work HARD before I'll ever buy anything with their name on it again. And not only work hard, do so over an extended period of time. So far they appear to be denying that they even did anything improper, and I'll NEVER trust them until long after they get beyond that.

Re:Well

[Ucklak (755284)]

I think both formats are going to die or stay in the second lane until the next best thing comes out.
Not everybody 'gets' the whole HD movement.
-Why should average shopper buy a BD or HD title if they already have it on DVD?
-How many consumers already think that DVD IS Hi Def?
-With all the Hi Def ready displays out there, how many actually show HD content?
-How many times do you go into a bar or sports restaurant where they DO have an HD display with Satellite hookup and HD content STILL SHOW Standard Def channels on the screen?
-How many times do you see in a public place the aspect ratio screwed up on one of those plasma displays?

The ONLY way BD/HD will surpass DVD is when the cost of a BD/HD title is less than a standard DVD and we don't see that happening at all, ever.
Video distributors will NOT stop making DVD's if they're selling and Hollywood will not issue an order to stop producing content for it for DRM sake.

Re:Well

[Bombula (670389)]

I suspect introducing a new standard to displace/replace DVD could backfire. As other posters have pointed out, DVD represented a paradigm shift in quality and features beyond VHS and other analog formats. It was revolutionary. HD DVD is more evolutionary. The reason why this might backfire is because the digital nature of media makes computers the ultimate fallback hardware. Here's what I mean. My old CD players won't play DVDs. My old DVD players won't play DVD-Rs or MP3s. But guess what will play everything? My computer. I finally got around to hooking up my computer to my home theater projector to watch a TV episode I recorded (don't worry, I always buy the box sets when they come out), and I'm hooked. Now I am seriously considering ripping my entire DVD collection so that it is instantly available. No more farting around loading discs, wading through slow menus, and all that crap. As companies like MS and Google push hardware and software that are designed to support every media format, pushing yet another new format on people could encourage them to do what I do but in an illegitimate way: pirate movies and TV and just play them off your computer. If you think of DVD Audio or Super Audio CDs, you have a prior example as an illustration. I don't own any DVD Audio or SACDs, but I've pulled stuff down from the web just to test it out. I didn't hear any difference because I'm not an audiophile, but if all of a sudden there was a shift away from traditional CDs to DVDA or SACDs that made my old ones stop working, I would simply rip everything onto my computer and run it all through my iPod. I can see a lot of this analogy holding for HD-DVD or whatever replaces DVD. DRM is obviously going to play a critical role in all this. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

ah, yes, the illegality of it all

[Phil Urich (841393)]

Keep in mind that ripping any CSS protected DVDs is likely to be illegal in your country.

Point. But more a point towards "wow, these laws are sortof stupid" than any real sort of warning. Unless one seriously expects companies to start looking at the contents of peoples' computers and then sueing them for it. Welllll, okay, nevermind, that's actually not that far off. But they really should not be allowed to get away with things like that, and I think it's better to hasten the day when that issue inevitiably comes up in a big way than to wait as public opinion adapts more and more to the currently strong zeitgeist of "if you aren't doing anything wrong...."

I mean, not to bring up politics, but yaknow . . .

But hey. Weren't there legal decisions in the favour of being able to make backups with older techs? But each new technology the fight is fought again, and each time the consumer side loses a bit more. Of course there are legal justifications for it (it being illegal to break encryption, etc etc) but there are enough random laws that these cases could in theory be justified many different ways for many different results.

Honestly, that's one of the reasons I'm relatively unlikely to buy DVDs (and much less likely to buy either of the new formats). Why in the world should I pay money for something that I'm not even allowed to use how I want, simply because the companies involved are greedy in an unrealistic way (ie. the actions motivated by their greed do not actually get the results they intend anyways)? And then it pays for things like the industry lobbying for the kind of laws that make it illegal to do things like making (what really should be perfectly legitimate backups, honestly, try to argue against it from a logical point of view knowing that the guy is using them for personal viewing, just making a bit simpler what he paid to be able to do anyway). Sorry, no thanks.

Damn, I guess they didn't satisfy the DRM req!?

[thecampbeln (457432)]

Or did Kevin Collins of Microsoft Corp. not have a first born child to offer up to the IP gods?

Learn from Steve Jobs

[tentimestwenty (693290)]

When will these idiots learn? You fake demos! At worst you have 2 or 3 computers/devices running simultaneously so you can switch to another when the first doesn't work.

Two points here...

[jmcmunn (307798)]

First point, HD-DVD had a bad demo and Cnet has one of the Blue Ray players on their "Best Of" list. Sounds like things are going to be interesting.

Second point, another famous demo failure I will point out is the infamous "Windows 98 Blue Screen of Death" that Microsoft had back in the day trying to show it off. And after that, only a few hundred million people used the OS. What a failure.

Re:Two points here...

[timbo234 (833667)]

Second point, another famous demo failure I will point out is the infamous "Windows 98 Blue Screen of Death" that Microsoft had back in the day trying to show it off

I don't see how this demo counts as a failure as it accurately demonstrated the typical user experience with that particular product.

Weird, i don't get t

[killa62 (828317)]

If you're showing off a new product in CES, don't you make absolute positively sure that the product actually works?
I mean this was a production model, so either all their prodution models are broken, or they got REALLY unlucky and got a bad one..
If it were me though and I was going to showcase a new product, I would make sure that it acutally worked..
Quality Control is your friend..

Re:Weird, i don't get t

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

Here's an interesting story for you. Back in the days when live TV was more common, Timex was going to run a live advertisement that showcased the durability of their watches. They strapped the watch to a boat's propellor, spun it around a bit, then showed how it "takes a lick'n, and keeps on tick'n!"

Timex ran the test a dozen or so times before they were supposed to go live. That watch did fine in every test. Then the golden moment came, and they were on the air. The watch took a lick'n as it was supposed to...

...and it stopped ticking.

All those tests they had done, and the watch had finally failed for the real deal. So you can't always predict these things. Now it's always funniest when it happens to Microsoft, but if you give Murphy an inch, he'll make sure to make a fool of you every time.

DRM

[c0dedude (587568)]

I will not buy either until safely assured the DRM is broken and I can rip as I want.

Re:DRM

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist (906833)]

>What will you do with the ripped bytes?

encode them and put them on my iPod with video.

and fuck you for implying people wanting to rip their own disks are planning to break for law. some of us happen to live in countries where businesses don't own the government so much that format shifting is illegal.

Re:DRM

[blincoln (592401)]

By far the most common use for copying digital entertainment is to share it in a way that deprives the creator of income.

But is that true in the big picture? When I was a kid, I used to bootleg VHS rentals all the time because I could afford 10-20 times as many movies that way. Now that I'm an adult with more income, I've bought the vast majority of those same films on DVD.

When I was a kid, my friends and I used to trade copies of audio tapes too, so that we could get each other interested in whatever music we liked. Again, as I got older I bought all of the ones I liked on CD.

I know there is a tiny group of people out there who really do pirate everything and never buy digital media, but I doubt they even come close to making up for the people like me who end up bringing money *into* the music and film industry.

Format wars and free markets

[argoff (142580)]

Just as an FYI. Format wars don't tend to get out of controll in a free market, it's only controlled market where people try to fence off "intellectual property" (which isn't a real free market property at all) that it becomes a problem.

Re:Format wars and free markets

[amliebsch (724858)]

Well, that's a neat rhetorical device, but you're begging the question by not having a consistent definition of "control," by which capitalists tend to mean, "coercive force." Say what you want about corporations, but at the end of the day, they can't legally initiate the use of force against you.

Why a format war?

[DrRobert (179090)]

I'll do what I did with DVD, DVD-A, SACD, HDCD. I won't buy anything until one player can play all of them. This was an impossible situation with Beta/VHS. I expect it will happen quickly with the hardware this time. The formats will confuse the hell out of people who just want a DVD though, sort of like back when Apple had a 100 models of macs that were all pretty much the same.

Highest Capacity Wins

[binaryspiral (784263)]

In my mind, who ever can fit the most bits on a disc wins. I don't give a flying carp about video quality or format wars... I want to cram the most data on a disc and that's all.

Re:Highest Capacity Wins

[cgenman (325138)]

On a disk or per dollar?

Dual-layer DVD+-R disks hold twice as much as the single-layer version, yet cost more than twice as much and haven't really taken off.

On the other hand, if all you really cared about was high capacity, why not buy a Hard Drive? For just 100 dollars you too could hold 260,000 MB in your hands.

HD-DVD's are lower capacity, but cheaper. Blu-Ray has a somewhat higher capacity, but is more expensive.

Either way we're not talking about Blu-Ray-RW yet, so how does capacity help?

Re:Nobody expects . . .

[slashkitty (21637)]

Size matters too.. Unless you believe some girlfriends.

Re:Highest Capacity Wins

[Hackeron (704093)]

I've learned the hard way that switching to DVDs for backup was a *BIG* mistake. While I could clean my 700MB CDs with sandpaper and they worked fine after that, the slightest mishandling of DVD caused jittery picture/sound or file curruption. Even if HD-DVD and Blueray are not as fragile as DVDs (yeah, right), the thought of losing 28GB of data this time round is, well, why take the risk.

I cant imagine anyone will use this crap for data storage so the capacity is a moot point. I built a nice 4tb array on raid5 that cost me around $800 (20 cents per GB which is CHEAPER than blueray/hd-dvd), or yes, a couple of 400GB drives on raid1 and your data is quite safe and you dont need >10 disks for same capacity.

Furthermore, with consumer ADSL having 2mb these days (granted asymetrical), you can afford to back up to a popular p2p network, best backup method possible and thats how I backup my legally purchased music/movies and other non private media.

Re:Highest Capacity Wins

[slashname3 (739398)]

I built a nice 4tb array on raid5 that cost me around $800

Now this would make an interesting article to read. Instead we get another cheap and easy shot at Microsoft and a new technology that won't be accepted as main stream ever.

So how about writing a story about how you built a 4TB raid array for $800 and list all the parts and trade offs. I for one would really be interested. Seriously.

Re:Highest Capacity Wins

[Hackeron (704093)]

Hmm, there's an idea :) -- Yeah, I'll do that, but I shamelessly changed the GBP poung sign to a dollar sign as I dont have the former on my keyboard and had some components to salvage to build the thing. Normally what costs 500 GBP here costs $500 in the US but seems hard drives are the exception.

In short, my part list is a gigabyte nforce4 motherboard with 8 onboard sata, an additional sata card with 4 ports that costs peanuts, a coolermaster stacker case and 12 400GB drives (4.8tb total but on 2 raid5s). If building from scratch in the US, the total would come to around $3k (2.4k for hard drives alone) which makes around 50 cents per GB so quite a different price. Still a bargain compared to the $110k 4TB IBM solutions ;)

"Nasty format war" my foot

[blake182 (619410)]

This is not a Betamax/VHS battle from the consumer's point of view. I mean, maybe the content providers and equipment manufacturers may view it this way, but there's a fundamental difference from the standpoint of the consumer.

With Betamax/VHS, there were pretty significant mechanical differences between the formats -- having a single unit that could play both types of media was essentially impossible without having two completely separate (expensive and futzy) transports. In the case of DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, they are all 12cm spinning optical discs with exactly the same physical characteristics from the transport point of view. Yes, there is a difference from the logical data formatting and laser point of view, but there is no reason that I can see (other than licensing from the respective consortiums) that a single player couldn't play CD, VCD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.

So fine, as a consumer, I don't give a shit. Frankly, I'm going to be buying DVDs as long as they make them, and I'm perfectly happy with that. Unless the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD consortium prevents manufacturers from making a unit that can play both types, I'm going to buy a new player that handles all of the formats, and they can jerk off as long as they want figuring out who's a winner, and I can buy pretty much whatever comes out and be able to play it.

Re:"Nasty format war" my foot

[hedred (906595)]

Samsung already announced they would make a unit that can play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray http://www.techspot.com/news/18625-samsung-to-supp ort-hddvd-and-bluray.html [techspot.com]

Where's the movie?

[fsterman (519061)]

Where's the movie for this? Was there really no cameras rolling?

Not all the HD-DVD demos were bad

[Glonk (103787)]

Not all of the HD-DVD demos were a bust.

BetaNews has some screencaptures of HD-DVD running on a Windows Vista PC (playing the Bourne Supremecy).

It's mostly a profile of "iHD", which as I understand it is a mix of EMCA Script and XML for the titles and interactivity of HD-DVDs.

Re:Not all the HD-DVD demos were bad

[Glonk (103787)]

Not all of the HD-DVD demos were a bust.

BetaNews has some screencaptures of HD-DVD running on a Windows Vista PC (playing the Bourne Supremecy).

It's mostly a profile of "iHD", which as I understand it is a mix of EMCA Script and XML for the titles and interactivity of HD-DVDs.

(Oops: a link would help: http://ces.betanews.com/entry/HD_DVD_and_iHD_in_Ac tion/1136757415 [betanews.com] )

biggest failure

[AkA lexC (939709)]

seems to be the name HD-DVD: imagine when we get recordable ones.. HD-DVD-RW. The abbriviation needs an abbriviation. At least blu-ray sounds futuristic

Format War

[bman08 (239376)]

I find myself feeling like WWII era Ukraine. Squished between Hitler and Stalin. Destined to be punished by whoever wins. I, for one, can't wait to be liberated by either blu-ray or HD-DVD.

The video games point

[jaymz2k4 (790806)]

At the end it quotes:

"The (video) games industry since the early 90s has had two or three incompatible formats and it hasn't slowed the adoption of game platforms,"

when i think about it, this seems like a great analogy to say 'hey, look 2 different types of disc isnt really that crazy or impractical' but i think they're missing a big point. can anybody imagine what it would be like to have a single console per generation? something within me is screaming 'that would suck, less innovation, less choice, less everything'. instinctivly i know that with video games having different consoles is definitly a good thing, i just cant seem to qualify it in writing appropiately, im sure some of you will agree.

with data storage/movies/whatever though i find it hard to accept having two potential 'standards'. we're not talking zip disks or anything here, were you know that your probably not going to be able to use it on 'every' computer you come across. yes, development of more than one type of _potential_ storage media is a good thing but for something that is so important from a cost/ease of use point of view there is, IMHO, room for -1- standard only in the end. unfortunatly some people are going to get burned when that eventual standard emerges.

Re:The video games point

[cnettel (836611)]

You have a point. It's interesting to note that it's technically easier to release a movie in several formats compared to porting games to different consoles. Maybe one important factor here is that even a complete newbie can understand the concept of an "Xbox" being different than a "PlayStation". HD-DVD and Bluray will never have that kind of appeal to the end consumer. They will own a player for oh-what's-the-name-gotta-look-at-the-sticker discs.

It will also be interesting to see if, for example, PC ga

"People want to own their content"

[achurch (201270)]

Did anyone else catch this little gem (granted, it's not a direct quote so the reporter might be playing fast and loose) down where they're talking about downloads vs. discs?

Studio executives argue that people want to own their content and that DVDs offer the same portability options as downloadable programs or video on demand services.

Okay, Mr. Studio Executive, perhaps now you'll explain to me just why you should be allowed to control how I use something that I own?

(The scary thing is that Joe Sixpack would probably eat up whatever bullshit the studio exec spouted in response . . .)

Call Me When The Bugs Are Out

[Master of Transhuman (597628)]

The optical media hardware industry can't get CURRENT DVD media to work reliably in all CURRENT drives. Go to any of the major DVD recording Web sites and see how many people have insane problems trying to find media to work with their drives. How are they going to get this one to work?

If you can measure the failure rate, it's too high. And DVD media are a nightmare to get working reliably. Only buy top-of-the-line Taiyo Yuden media and DVD drives made in Japan. Nobody else - meaning the Taiwanese - can get it to work reliably.

Call me when there are HD drives on the market and media that work together RELIABLY.

In other words, call me in two or three years.

HD discs are long overdue

[Zobeid (314469)]

I'm getting sick and tired of people saying things like:

"DVDs are great, why do we need anything better?"

When LaserDisc was introduced in 1978, they were GREAT. They were amazing. They could push right up against the limits of the NTSC standard. LD was really over-designed because very few people had TV sets good enough to show them off properly. DVD video is basically the same thing, it's designed to hit the NTSC standard. TV sets today are many times better than those of 1978, it's the signal standard that needs to catch up now.

So. . . 27 years after the introduction of LD format, how much longer should we wait for an improvement? 50 years? 100 years? Should we just give up on the idea of progress completely, and settle for watching blurry NTSC-quality images from now on?

No. We need a pre-recorded format for ATSC -- we've needed it badly for several years, in fact. This is the one huge element that has been missing from the HDTV transition.

Now we're on the verge of a video format that can show movies in a reasonably close approximation to how they appeared in theaters. VHS can't do that, LD can't do that, DVD can't do that. HD discs will. Nobody should underestimate the importance of this, because the back catalog of movies that can benefit from this presentation goes back many decades, there are literally thousands of them. There are movies from the 1930s or possibly even earlier that will look better on HD discs than they can on DVDs.

That won't happen again. If somebody 10 years from now tries to come up with some new format to replace Blu-Ray, or replace HD-DVD, they're going to run into a big obstacle. It's because most movies in the back catalog don't contain a lot more information than ATSC can present. Most movies weren't shot in 3D, they weren't shot in IMAX. There's nothing to be gained by presenting them in a format more advanced than ATSC-HD.

We can already see a preview of that, because there have been quite a few TV series shot, or produced, on NTSC videotape, which means they won't benefit from being put on HD discs. This is why I think HD format has a lot to offer, but anything that comes after it will probably falter in much the same way that SACD and DVD-A are faltering.

Re:Why the worst link to this story?

[neonstz (79215)]

That "demo" is obviously rigged. The colors are not the same. I'm not sure if there are any differences in the video format other than resolution, but I'm pretty sure regular DVD can display yellow.

Re:Blu-Ray

[Cal Paterson (881180)]

HD DVD has drm too. So did DVD. Read up.

Re:Just why the hell do we need to replace DVD, no

[Reality Master 101 (179095)]

I used to think DVD was acceptable, until I bought my 50" Plasma and saw "real" HD source material (and no, not everything that they claim is HD is really HD). You don't realize how much DVDs suck until you see them on a good monitor.

Re:Just why the hell do we need to replace DVD, no

[CastrTroy (595695)]

That's like saying a 4 MegaPixel digital cameras suck because you can't print out pictures that are 100x80 inches. I never plan to print out pictures this big. On the same note, I never plan to have a 50+ inch TV. Really, my 27 inch seems like all I'll ever need. Maybe someday i'll get at 36 inch. But seriously, I never forsee in my life having the need for a 50+ inch television. So DVD is just fine for me.

Re:Yeah, that's never happened before....

[CastrTroy (595695)]

That's because people who use Linux realize there's a better fix for most things than "reinstall the OS". This seems to be the standard way of fixing things in windows when things start going wrong. On the other hand, I don't think I've ever seen someone recommending "reinstalling the OS" for Linux as a general solution to everything.

Re:And the reason we're going to a new DVD format.

[Zobeid (314469)]

I'm sure the movie people are licking their chops at the prospect of selling many of us our favorite movies for the second or third time. However. . . They probably don't realize it yet, but HD discs are the end of that gravy train. There's nowhere else to go after HD.

You ask, aren't DVDs good enough? No. Personally, I don't think DVDs are good enough. They're the video equivalent of LP records. The video quality of DVD is basically the same as Laserdiscs, which have been around since 1978. For tha

Re:Has Steve Jobs ever had a demo fail like that?

[dabraun (626287)]

At last year's macworld the mac that steve was using locked up (or at least the app he was using locked up, can't remember clearly) - he calmly noted that 'this is why we have backup systems for demos', pressed a button, and started that portion of the demo over on a different machine. He was demoing something in tiger and did note that it was not 'done' yet.