To be fair iHD is also a lot more lightweight and a lot easier to wrap your head around.
iHD has about 200 methods and 250 properties.
BDJ has roughly 10,000 methods.
That's 10,000 methods that every single player is going to have to implement and test.
We're talking 20x more complexity, for discs which 99.9% of the time are going to show
menus.
MENUS!
People point to cellphones as a successful space where Java works, but just let me quote John Carmack on this one:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/Recent Updates
Now do we really want BD authoring to turn into something like Java in the cellphone space?
Cause that's exactly what it's going to turn into if you force all these CE companies to develop and implement such massively complex systems. And the end result will be that the disc authors will have to slowly figure out what tiny subset of the system is actually reasonably stable and works between all of the players out there, and they'll just end up sticking to that small piece that works. And they'll have to maintain huge test labs to exhaustively validate that everything they write works on every single player. Or they'll have to have multiple code paths to work around different bugs. They might even have to supply patches.
But then why not design the system properly in the first place to be lightweight, easily implementable and testable, and focused on what 99.9% of the discs are going to need?
The point is, sure, iHD might not be as powerful as BDJ, but it's also not as hard to implement, not nearly as complex, and it's designed specifically to meet the requirements for what the vast majority of disc authors need. It's not some catch-all set top box standard that's been shoehorned into being a movie title authoring system.
On the spectrum of capability, HDMV << iHD < BDJ.
HDMV is a very basic menuing system. It's basically DVD's menuing system updated for HD and I believe in both the HD DVD and BD specs you have the option of using classic DVD-style menus for authoring. This was done to allow early discs to be quickly authored since all the disc creators already understand DVD menus, that knowledge can be transferred over pretty quickly.
Both BDJ and iHD completely destroy HDMV in terms of sophistication and feature set.
The reason for iHD to exist is that a bunch of the companies involved think HDMV is not enough and BDJ is overkill.
You crazy Mefisutoferesu. I feel the same way though. So we get to play Japanese games that don't come out in NA right?