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High Definition DVD 326

Posted by michael from the looks-good-on-a-13-inch-set dept.
Vinnie_333 writes "Looks like the specs for HD-DVD are currently being discussed by Hollywood big wigs, with an optimistic product release date of Xmas of 2003. Unfortunately, they seem to be completely disregarding the higher storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disc standard, that will hold 6 times the amount of a DVD-9, for the current red laser format with a different compression algorithm. Come on, more storage is always a good thing. Not only will it give us the quality we deserve, it is likely to cut down on Hollywood's largest fear (piracy) by making the media ungodly HUGE."
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High Definition DVD More

High Definition DVD

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  • Great (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @10:48AM (#4004557)
    Now we have to throw away all the current players and TV's to take advantage of this. People are just now getting used to DVD's and they want to switch formats so soon? Bad move.

    • Re:Great (Score:3, Insightful)

      by waytoomuchcoffee ( 263275 )
      Now we have to throw away all the current players and TV's to take advantage of this. People are just now getting used to DVD's and they want to switch formats so soon? Bad move.

      You're an idiot. This is for those people that have ALREADY thrown out their TV's for HDTV. Current DVDs can't support more than 520p, while this format would do 720p/1080i.

    • Re:Great (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 )
      "Already"? I've had and used a DVD player for several years, and have been looking to replace it anyways (because of support for things like MP3 playback. On top of that, as mine was one of the early players menu switches and such takes a lot of time). If the new players, when they come out (probably not for about 2 years) let you enjoy your old library as well (which I have zero doubt that it will), then where's the downside?

      The TV issue is a non-issue anyways: Already the TV shops are filling up with HDTV TVs, and the avaialability of media is increasing. Hell, we've used the same format (NTSC) for a long, long time now, and it is quite obsolete.
  • once the writes for those huge disks come out, hollywood would be shit scared. you could burn all of your mp3's on 3 disks and send them to anyone anywhere.

    plus you could still compress the movies down to regular cdr sizes. you would just loose all that extra stuff you dont have now.

  • Compression (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How does this cut down on fears of piracy? Why couldn't they be compressed back down?
    • They'll need 30 gigs of usable space on their hard drive to rip it before compressing, but you're right - it won't have any affect on piracy, unless you don't have 30 gigs of HD space free.

      Of course, if we can make the MPAA think there's less piracy, that'd be good...

  • a discrepancy (IMHO) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03, 2002 @10:53AM (#4004570)
    "Not only will it give us the quality we deserve, it is likely to cut down on Hollywood's largest fear (piracy) by making the media ungodly HUGE."

    No it won't, it will have no effect because people will just reencode it to a lower bitrate. Whether the DVD is at9 mbps or 20 mbps people will still encode it to 3000 kbps and fit it on 2 or 3 cd's

    • Re:a discrepancy (IMHO) (Score:2, Insightful)

      by JeffSh ( 71237 )
      True, I was originally going to post that point as well.

      The only roadblock the higher capacity would be is in the size of the intial rip. Currently in DVD encoding, you need to rip the entire dvd contents and then encode which requires 8-9 gigs free.

      So really you would need more free disk space for the rip, but thats the only difference. and it's not like disk space is in short supply nowadays.

      and even then, if you only had a limited amount of space to do the rip, there are ways around it; albeit it more time consuming.

      • pipes? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gimpboy ( 34912 )
        i dont have a dvd player, and the only people i know who rip them use windows. shouldnt it be possible to pipe the information between programs?

        something like this:

        $bash: decss_dvd /dev/dvd | avi_compressor -o dvd.avi -

        surely this is possible, and it wouldnt require any more disk space than that required for the avi file.

        • Re:pipes? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          not really DVD ripping involves many steps first you have to deencode it (decss) then you have to rip the music out of it, then you have to frameserve it then you finally have to encode it to a lower bitrate. Although there are ways to just pipe a rip (http://www.vcdhelp.com/dvdbackup.htm) i have heard of peoples DVD drives messing up because they are reading constantly for like 14 hours. Storage space has become cheap, just do it the old fasioned way

          • linux dvd ripping guides (Score:5, Informative)

            by David Jao ( 2759 ) <djao@dominia.org> on Saturday August 03, 2002 @12:56PM (#4004972) Homepage
            Since people are asking for linux dvd ripping guides, here are some ... and let's hope Judge Kaplan of the MPAA doesn't smite slashdot for these links:
            1. Moritz's DVD ripping and transcoding with Linux [bunkus.org] howto
            2. Linux SVCD guide [212.68.196.9], written in French
            3. My own Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide [dominia.org] (shameless plug) -- intended for anime fansubbers but perfectly serviceable as a ripping guide if you ignore the stuff about subtitles.
            The summary is that all the stuff your friends do under windows (divx, vbr, two-pass encoding, pulldown flags, inverse telecine, etc.) are perfectly feasible under linux too, using free software.

        • Re:pipes? (Score:2, Informative)

          by Angron ( 127881 )
          In order to do good rips, you generally want to encode it in VBR in order to get a better balance between slow scenes and high-motion scenes. This currently requires at least two passes, one to determine how bits should be allocated proportionally, and another to figure out what to actually write into the final file.

          Of course it could probably be done without putting it on the HD just by issuing a couple of commands, one to write out a "stats" file, and another to use the stats file to actually write the movie. Or if one just creates a frameserving program that'll serve off of the DVD rather than the vob's on a hard drive.

        • Well it should be possible but there are a few extra factors that need to be considered.

          Firstly when you "rip" a dvd you get a whole bunch of files. Some are the movie, some are the menus, some are the specials, info files etc... So you really need to rip 4 or 5 seperate (but combined by the encoder, not the ripper) movie files (max size 1GB) then encode on those files.

          Next (I'm just talking about pal here not ntsc, i believe you may need to do more for ntsc) you need to crop and resize the picture, cropping is neccessary because of the black bars at the bottom of the screen, they take up a lot of bandwidth believe it or not. Also I like to chop a bit of each edge to give it a 640 horizontal res. The cropping process is usually a manual and visual one which is not well suited to the command line. You also need to rip and encode the audio. It's stored in AC3 format in the same files as the video, I like to process the audio seperatly from the video, obviously this requires me to have previously ripped the files. You then need to combine the audio and video and you may wish to rip the subtitles.

          Subtitles are stored as pictures (!) on the dvd not text, for reasons of filesize you will probably want to convert them to text though. This is an interactive process using OCR (like scanner software) but you have to sit there and type letters into the OCR software. The subtitles also come from the same files as the audio and video so again using pipes is not a particularly viable option.

          What I would absolutly freeking love would be would be a set of scripts to rip a dvd, this should be possible since someone else has already done the work. Take for example when I buy the next set of star-trek dvd's that is a lot of work to rip the whole season. I'd love for someone that has already done it to make some scripts available.

  • By the time this comes out (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Saturday August 03, 2002 @10:55AM (#4004573) Homepage Journal
    That kind of size won't be so scary. Remember when CD media first started coming out and the record industry smugly thought that it was unpiratable because 650M was just so ungodly huge. Even DVD movies, oversized as they are for net piracy, can be recompressed down to a file that can be transferred over a broadband connection with little trouble.

    The moral of the story is: size is a poor piracy prevention tool. Technology will eventually catch up no matter how big you make something.
    • Strictly speaking, technology did not catch up. DivX and the like improved the situation for rippers, but movies distributed on the net are rarely as good as the DVDs. They generally miss all of the bonus features, and on top of that you usually have to watch on your computer.

      The real moral is: people don't need the absolute best quality to watch a movie or listen to a song. Most of the time they're satisfied with something that is merely adequate.
    • so you are saying that, in fact, size doesn't matter?
    • Okay, honestly, do you really think any MPAA member has lost anything worth mentioning at all from internet downloads of movies? Do you know anyone who avoided a trip to the theater, or even a trip to the video rental shop, because they spent hours and hours downloading hundreds of megs of movie that looks like crap?

      That said, since all the copied movies are in lossy formats anyway, adding more resolution to the source won't make the lossy copies any bigger.

  • Could this help get HDTV going? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by one9nine ( 526521 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @10:57AM (#4004584) Journal
    It seems to me the reason why hardly anybody owns HDTV is that there aren't many broadcasts in HDTV. But, there aren't many broadcasts in HDTV because there aren't enough people out there that have HDTVs. So, if people start buying HDTVs in order to take advantage of the better quality of HD-DVDs, will this provide incentive for more HDTV broadcasts since more people will own HDTVs? Or, are we just going to go another decade without HDTV?
    • Actually, MANY people own HDTV's. Most of the mid to high end TV's sold over the last few years have been HDTV capable.

      But, very few of those people with HD capable sets have taken the next step and bought a HD receiver. Most of those people got their HD and/or Widescreen TV to play DVD's.

      So, an HD DVD standard would be the logical next step for this market. (Although I don't have much hope for the Blue-Ray DVD's doing good quality HD). D-VHS will still be much higher quality.

      People won't start buying the HD decoders until the marketing picks up. As is obvious here, people don't understand the value of Digital TV, or the amount of programming already out there.

  • Two stages (Score:5, Insightful)

    by benwaggoner ( 513209 ) <.ben.waggoner. .at. .microsoft.com.> on Saturday August 03, 2002 @11:00AM (#4004591) Homepage
    Except that Blu-ray couldn't possibly be mass market by Christmas 2003. The nice thing about a red laser system is that the physical medium of the disc doesn't have the change, which means the hardware in existing DVD players can be mostly the same, with just a different decoder chip. Fast computers will just need a software update. And, of course, replication and duplication facilities won't need to chance, so it'll cost well less than $1 to make an HD disc, which means we could start seeing mass market prices very quickly.

    This is really good from the Hollywood perspective. They'll get us all to buy 1280x720 red laser HD discs from 2003-2006, and then come out with 1920x1080 Blu-ray as a mass market technology around Christmas 2006-2008, when they get all the kinks worked out. Same way we've already bought DVD and laserdisc versions of the same movie.

    The article claims that the compression technology will be from Microsoft, but my contacts tell me it is much more likely to be MPEG-4, in order to have a technology not tied to any one vendor. Of course, Windows Media derived codecs would offer better compression efficiency. We shall see.

    • Re:Two stages (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nojayuk ( 567177 )

      The problem with the red-laser DVD is that it is already pushed to its limits to hold ordinary encoded PAL/NTSC video data plus the new high-data-rate audio (DTS and/or DD), and even then critical viewers mutter about compression artefacts. HD TV displays are, to make them sellable to Joe Public, going to require about four times as many pixels on screen as ordinary PAL/NTSC. Compressing HDTV harder is going to result in a display which is pretty well identical to existing DVD playback, rather negating the point of shelling out the bucks for a new receiver/display unit.

      If they want four times as many pixels on screen, the designers are going to have to use a record media with a higher data transfer rate; they can't get that from DVDs except by perhaps spinning them at four times their rated speed, and that only works for 44 minute TV episodes. If they want to sell two-hour long movies without having to do the laserdic thang of flipping and changing discs every hour or so, they'll need the blue laser.

      Blu-Ray (tm) is backwards-compatible. It'll play anything that comes in a 12cm optical disc -- CD, CD/G, DVD, SVCD, maybe even DVD-Audio, but HDTV replay is the reason it was designed in the first place.

      Don't expect to see Blu-ray (tm) recorders for a while though. It was bad enough getting DVD-R lasers to work.

      • The problem with the red-laser DVD is that it is already pushed to its limits to hold ordinary encoded PAL/NTSC video data plus the new high-data-rate audio (DTS and/or DD), and even then critical viewers mutter about compression artefacts.

        You can't just assume that all encoding is the same. An improved compression algorithm can both increase quality, and decrease size, at the cost of compute power needed to compress/decompress the video. Newer codecs with much higher quality and higher compression rates then MPEG2 are possible today because fast chips have become quite inexpensive.

        I agree that the higher capacity discs should be the next generation, but there is no reason quality video can't be distributed on the current discs. (Now if you want quality content then you have a whole different problem entirely.)

      • Re:Two stages (Score:5, Interesting)

        by foobar104 ( 206452 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @12:33PM (#4004904) Journal
        HD TV displays are, to make them sellable to Joe Public, going to require about four times as many pixels on screen as ordinary PAL/NTSC.

        Check your math.

        720 x 480 = 345,600 pixels in an NTSC picture

        1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels in a 1080 picture

        That's exactly six times as many pixels, not four.

        (Oh, and for the record, 720 pictures have 2.25 times as many pixels as NTSC pictures.)

        If they want four times as many pixels on screen, the designers are going to have to use a record media with a higher data transfer rate

        Again, just for the record, 1080i--including a Dolby Digital audio track-- compressed to about 20 Mbps is acceptable. (OTA HD is encoded at slightly over 19 Mbps and it's usually very good, while D-VHS at 25 Mbps is exceptional.)

        Superbit DVDs are encoded at around 7 Mbps. So the difference between today's DVDs and HD-DVD-- not counting capacity, of course-- is only about a factor of 3. That wouldn't be too hard to achieve.

        Then there's the capacity problem. I'd hate to have to buy a twenty disc set of a movie and have to flip discs every three minutes.
      • If the Red HD system used MPEG-2, maybe. But since they'll use either MPEG-4 or a Windows Media derivative, they need a LOT fewer bits per pixel to delivery.

        There is also a lot of cruft on current DVD's as well. For a feature length film, you'd use a dual-layer DVD-9, not offer different aspect ratios, and probably would dump the vastly overrated DTS. Probably would use AC-3 and/or AAC. You'd be able to sustain 8 Mbps average this way. And heck, there are only 160% more bits/frame with 1280x720 than 720x480, so we only need a 50% improvement in compression efficiency to be able to pull this off. MPEG-4 Advanced Simple provides this easily.

    • By the 2006-2008 timeframe, FMD-ROM technology storing 1 TeraByte will probably be available (working demo already shown - not vaporware as I had feared!), so this could negate the need to compress at all, wouldn't it? Or am I completely mistaken about how much space a movie takes up?
    • Why is does DVD use a red laser? I thought it used a green laser. Green lasers have a shorter wavelength and so ought to hold more. Why wasn't DVD designed around green lasers?

  • folly? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Martin Doudoroff ( 116376 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @11:00AM (#4004592) Homepage
    Quite a bit of intelligent and deeply detailed writing on this subject (and many more) has graced the pages of Widescreen Review [widescreenreview.com]. Their point of view is strongly in favor of waiting for a higher density, higher bitrate DVD formats over trying to rig the existing DVD format for high definition content. They claim the inside perspective is that high definition DVD is at least five (5) years away. They have also provided extensive coverage of the new D-Theater D-VHS high definition consumer tape format that is available right now for people with fancy video projectors and deep pockets. D-Theater doesn't look like it will ever be a mass-market technology, but its apparently a really nice interim technology and it seems to deliver video that truly does rival quality theatrical media. (If your projector is up to snuff, of course.)
    The problem I see is that the existing DVD format has become a huge success, with the consumer electronics and movie industries heavily investing in it and heavily profiting in it. Consumers love the format, despite its irritating, customer-hostile feaures (such as region encoding and material the user interface prevents you from fast-forwarding through or skipping). I doubt either industry wants to compromise or confuse such a successful market. (Similarly, gamers have been so happy playing Half Life and its mods that Valve hasn't bothered to release a completely new game product in many years.)

  • incentive to change? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by merc_sa ( 35777 )
    the record industry had been busy bloodsucking themselves on cash instead of watching the tech
    trends. They should have gone to DVD audio a long time ago except they were too busy gorging on profits.
    If the movie industry is smart, they'd start pushing the combo drive idea to whet the appetite of the early adopter now.
    That way when the rewritable DVD standard emerges, they would be ahead of the curve, instead of being
    caught between a pirating public that's tired of being fleeced, and lack of an install base for the next technology trend..
    (and then having to resort to dos'ing and lawyering to keep their shrinking market)

  • I'm betting.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Restil ( 31903 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @11:25AM (#4004680) Homepage
    That the primary purpose of reviewing this is to "fix" the "joke" copyprotection that's on the classic DVD. The first time around they either poorly underestimated the abilities of a few dedicated hackers or they just didn't understand simple technology when it came to encryption. of course, as much as the copy protection was considered an important factor on DVDs, the storage capacity, image quality, and lack of degregation were more important when it was designed. The copy protection was an industry requirement, one that despite their efforts has made no difference. Not really sure what the purpose of region coding was, beyond forcing people to buy multiple DVD players or to use them illegally.

    Despite their abilities to improve the encryption on their new DVD standard, it will only delay, but not competely thwart the efforts of those who have the desire and the ability to break it. The second ANY software is available to play it back, that software has to be distributed. It can always be disassembled and rebuilt from the assembly level. It will take a LONG time, but if someone wants it badly enough.....

    -Restil

    • Re:I'm betting.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by donutello ( 88309 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @12:58PM (#4004985) Homepage
      Not really sure what the purpose of region coding was, beyond forcing people to buy multiple DVD players or to use them illegally.

      The purpose of region encoding was to allow them to sell the same movie at different prices in different markets and also to control their "marketing strategy". They'd want to do this for a number of reasons:
      1. Different economies: The ideal price of a DVD (that at which the makers make the most money i.e. where price x #sold is maximized) is very different in France than in Japan. In order to maximize their revenues, the producers want to price them differently. Now, they don't want people buying the DVDs at the cheaper markets and selling them at the other markets because that negates the whole thing.
      2. Distribution rights: Typically distribution rights to a movie are sold to a local distributor who then makes all the money off of it. If people are able to buy the same movie in Region A and import it in to Region B (they'd want to do this because of cost and availability), the distributor for Region A loses to the benefit of the distributor in Region B. They wanted to prevent that happening.
      3. Marketing: Movies are (used to be more in the past) released at different times in different markets for various reasons (translations, legal, lazy asses, etc.). This is accompanied with advertising campaigns, star appearances, etc. They didn't want to undercut that by making DVDs from other regions available via import and mainly because they liked being in full control of distribution.

      For all those reasons, region encoding seemed like a great idea to them.

      Personally, I think it was a dumb idea and they should just have relied on the fact that in most situations it would just not be practical or cost-effective to import DVDs en masse just like book distributors do when they sell books at different prices in different parts of the world.

      • Re:I'm betting.. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by David Jao ( 2759 )
        The ideal price of a DVD is very different in France than in Japan.

        Ironically, your example is a bad one, because both France and Japan are region 2.

      • 3. Marketing: Movies are (used to be more in the past) released at different times in different markets for various reasons

        Yep, the American trailers for Amalie totally turned me off to seeing the movie. When I saw the French ones I went out and rented the DVD. All the time wishing I'd seen it in the theater. Sigh.
    • The second ANY software is available to play it back, that software has to be distributed. It can always be disassembled and rebuilt from the assembly level.

      What if there never is any software to play HD-DVDs?
  • VHS became popular in the mid 70's I think. (I don't know, wasn't conceived then). DVD was released in 1996-7. I bought my first DVD player in 1998 from Circuit City. I paid 250 for it, got a new movie, and 5 divx discs. (Still love whipping them out and scaring my friends). When Divx went under I got 100 check in the mail. So my question is, will this new standard be avaliable less than 2 years after its release for 150 dollars? If not, they are wasting theirs and our collective time.

    The most good that will come from this format is putting the last nail in the VHS coffin.

    • VHS became popular in the mid 70's I think.

      More like late 80s. I bought my first VHS machine around 1984 --and it cost me over a thousand dollars. They didn't really become popular until a few years after that, when the price had dropped to just a few hundred.

      DVD holds the record for being the fastest adopted consumer electronics technology. Sales of DVD players edged out VHS machines last year. (Mechanically, DVD players are much simpler than videocassette machines, and build on the experience of making CD players.)

      However, VHS will be around for a long time to come, until recording to DVD (or whatever) becomes as easy as recording to tape is now.
  • This argument does not always work.

    Look at the difference between wavs and MP3s. uncompressed vs compressed.

    Even with as huge format, all you need is someone with a acceptable to the mass market format that people will tolerate. People listen to MP3s all the time even though it is usually easy to hear the difference between that and the real original.

    depending on the content, people will put up with a lot of stuff.

  • You are confused... (Score:5, Funny)

    by wo1verin3 ( 473094 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @11:39AM (#4004730) Homepage
    ... Hollywoods biggest fear is that Britney Spears will try to make another movie.

    Piracy is a close second.
    • Actually I think that given that Crossroads only cost $12 million to make and made $37 million in the US box office alone, I imagine their fear of her *not* making another movie is higher. It actually paid for itself plus another $5 million on its opening weekend! I can just imagine that it is going to similarly well in video rentals.
    • Hollywoods biggest fear is that Britney Spears will try to make another movie. Didn't you see the new Austin Powers movie? It's my hopes that she *does* make another movie. This time with the guy who plays Mini-Me as her boyfriend.

      Now that's a midget porn flick I'd watch!


  • I'm imagining that the largest downside with Blu-ray is that it requires the DVD producers to completely upgrade their infrastructure of DVD mastering equipment. With a different encoding standard, you could theoretically use the same equipment to master both DVD's and HD-DVD's. How big of a downside that is... I don't know.

    I wonder why the industry doesn't just do both? Better compression, better capacity means even more freedom for content producers.

  • Blue laser? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ErikZ ( 55491 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @12:18PM (#4004846)
    I was talking to some people on an HDTV forum about this. I want an HDTV, but I'm not going to get one until I can get a DVD player and an HDTV that can do 720p

    To have a DVD that can contain enough information to have that kind of resolution, you need the blue laser.

    Someone said that currently, blue lasers have a lifetime expectancy of 300 hours. Does anyone know if this is true? Is this a major roadblock?

  • But consumers were screwed in the first place... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Brat Food ( 9397 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @01:10PM (#4005026) Homepage
    Consmers have been screwed by hollywood already, ill break it down:

    HDTV, as a potential standard, has been around for a LONG time, but the bug media players keep stonewalling, and pusing back the date the FCC would have them force adoption by, among other things, throwing a million different standards out there and not agreeing on one. I seem to remember the FCC deadline being 2002..... And now, i have to wait another year to get what will more then likely be a defective standard. The reason, is they need to FINALLY invest in an infrastruture change after forcing consumers to stuick with the relativly low bandwidth and quality TV we still have after all these years. This then creates a catch-22, as it has for years... BigMedia doesnt want to invest in something where there is no market, tv makers cant drop prices and make a "standard" box because BigMedia wont decide on a standard and wont/cant release content, and then consumers may want but have no content or way to view it.

    The end result of this will be: consumers get screwed out of a GOOD standard that provides (potentially) excellent quality, and i fear it will end up with inferior quality and useability.

    On to DVD: People have know for YEARS that DVD does not provide the bandwidth to do full HDTV content. Issue one, 9gb is too small, issue 2, home readrs cant get to the datarate needed to even read off a datastream at that resolution. So, once again,insted of taking an oportunity to think ahead for once, we will end up with a standard that is 2 years dead when it comes out. And consumers STILL need to buy a new player. Most just wont know they are buying obsolete technology as they have been for years.

    Im completly frustrated about all this, and the FCC needs to apoint an OUTSIDE firm with no intrest in bigmedia to hammer out standards that are good for the consumer, are timely, and have potential of more then 2 years ago. I dont know why what is happening is acceptable to anyone.

  • I hope electronics makers are smart enough to make players with component output and not be forced in to DVI like the film makers want. Really piss off the current HDTV owners.
    • They will will probably have component output, but down-rezed to 480p to thwart those dangerous pirates. If you actually want to watch HD content in HD, better start saving for a DVI TV.
      • Someone in Hong Kong will make a DVI to Component converter, I have no doubt. Or, some lesser known company will make one with real component output.

        Manufacturers don't always listen to the publishers. Supposedly it was designed that DVD-A was analog output only to stop bit for bit copying, but DVD makers are now outputting digital.
  • They're not ignoring the blue-laser encoding. They've dismissed it since it would require a retooling of the entire recording industry, requiring the movie industry to pass the cost on to consumers. Some people might be willing to pay $35 to $50 per DVD, but I'm not, and neither are the vast majority of consumers.

  • Neither format is great (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cutie Pi ( 588366 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @01:44PM (#4005177)
    I have reservations about both the Blu-Ray and the proposed HD-DVD being standardized in the near future.

    First, as many have stated, using a new compression algorithm with the exisitng stoage of DVDs can be both good and bad. It is definitely good studios, who already have the standard DVD mastering equipment, and for DVD player manufacturers, who have already developed the red-laser hardware. It is good for the consumer in that the new players would probably be pretty cheap. I think cheapness is key for the acceptance of HDTV technology. Currently the sets are very expensive, and with the limited number of HD broadcasts, there is little incentive to buy one. Of course supply and demand is at work here--if more people bought them, the price would go down. Therefore, affordable HD-DVD players would go a long way in making HDTV's more attractive and useful, which would make their price drop and increase their market presence. Hopefully we would then see more HD broadcasts.

    The problem with using exisiting DVD storage for HD-DVD is that is probably going to be obsolete sooner... bad for the consumer. Plus, I question how good the new compression algorithms really are. HDTV will tend to make compression artifacts and defects all the more obvious... again bad for the consumer.

    Blu-Ray has many benefits in that has a much higher capacity (100GB if I remember correctly), so it will probably have a longer lifetime in the consumer marketplace. And, the picture quality would undoubtedly be of higher quality because the compression ratios would be lower. However, I fear that it is too costly of a technology to be a standard today or the next year. It would be great 5 years down the road, but not now. My reasoning? Blue lasers are really not ready for prime time... They are difficult to manufacture and are still extremely expensive. DVD player manufacturers still probably have much work to do to develop a consumer-grade blue laser disc playing system. Furthermore, the disc manufacturers would have to completely retool. I can see the discs and players being very expensive for a long time. This could further delay HDTV's acceptance in the mass market.

    If I had to pick a technology today, it would have to be Hollywood's HD-DVD format, because I think it is important to give consumers incentive to buy HDTV's. Unless the Blu-Ray format can be substantially cheapened in one year (unlikely), I say wait a few more years for Blu-Ray.

  • Loss of control, not piracy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by captaineo ( 87164 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @02:33PM (#4005348)
    Hollywood's biggest fear is not piracy... It's that someone will be able to create and distribute a popular feature film outside the studio system. That would be the beginning of the end of their monopoly on popular film and hence culture.

    Like DVD, expect it to be extremely difficult to author a properly formatted and encrypted HD DVD (not ripped from an existing one)...
  • All this whining about red-laser DVDs not being sufficient is irrelevant. Anyone here taken 1080i HDTV mpeg2 transport stream and transcoded it to 9Mb/s MPEG4, raise your hands -- anyone else, sit down and shut up.

    I know some people over on avsforum.com who did exactly that, except they used DiVX which is almost the same as MPEG4. The results were fantastic. For the most part it was not possible to distinguish between the original and the DiVX. With a commercial MPEG4 I am sure the results will be even better.

    Other then brand-new copy-prevention schemes, and the whole having to buy it again thing, I look forward to Hi-Def DVDs.

    If they are smart, they will also add anamorphic 2.35:1 and pan&scan tracks so that dumb people can buy the same discs as smart people and still be happy. (Yes, I know those two are part of the current DVD standard, but they aren't common enough in players for any publisher to use them.) And, if they are really smart, they will do double-sided discs - one side regular DVD and one side Hi-Def DVD. But when as the MPAA ever been smart?

  • Red Ray vs. Blue Ray (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Temsi ( 452609 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @06:32PM (#4006090) Journal
    The reason why they're going with the old red-ray instead of the new blue-ray is very simple:
    Backwards compatibility.
    The only way they can entice people to buy a new HD DVD player, is if it can play their old SD DVD's as well.
    Now, of course one could conceivably build a player with both red and blue ray lenses, but sticking with red-ray only means manufacturing the players will be cheaper.
    Cheaper players means faster implementation in the market place.
    Don't forget, it's all about the Benjamins...

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