AOD vs Blu-ray revisited...

[MfA]

Microsoft's licensing deal is comparitively good, for most DVD drive manufacturers they arent a competitor ... and I bet they would rather H.264 was scrapped.

Im still hoping this is the future BTW.

 

[wco81]

They also thought the Toshiba format could suffer the same fate as the current DVD format: commoditization by "cheap Chinese copycats."

It's very shortsighted to fight against the emergence of a global economy and the economical emergence of underdeveloped countries. "First-world" nations have far too long relied upon the virtual slave trade of outsourcing production work to undeveloped countries for pennies-per-hour wages.

That's the one thing that's often overlooked in the outsourcing/offshoring debate, the transfer of technology to countries which come back to compete against you. The Japanese hardware manufacturers think they gave away the store to the Chinese, which led to the cheap $40 DVD players. The WSJ story said they wanted to move on to the next thing after the DVD was commoditized.

We can look at the consumer electronics in general. The US abdicated the market after inventing things like color television and VCRs in the '60s. By the time the Compact Disc arrived, all the R&D was being done by the Japanese and Philips. The DVD of course was also developed by the foreign companies. HDTV was something we wanted to develop here but one of the key companies ATSC Grand Alliance, Zenith, now is owned by a foreign company and most of the digital TV hardware sold in this country is manufactured overseas by foreign companies.

 

[Fafalada]

The + and -R formats are for all intents and purposes mostly identical in terms of functionality / compatibility. Though as noted, the + format tends to lead the -R format in terms of burning speed.

-R media is a fair bit cheaper though. Burning speed is not really an issue with roms unless you're truly mass producing them - but that would probably involve certain ehm... activities.

However, there are some notable advantages of the +RW format over the -RW format.

Quite true, but then again both RW formats are inferior to RAMs in terms of functionality.