*Rumors Spin-off* 360 & Blu Ray
- Thread starter patsu
- Start date
not when other users are reporting the same problems
you would think a year later the bluray platform wouldn't have these problems anymore.
I think you nailed the bulk of the problem right there. Even if Microsoft did make a bluray add-on and executed/priced it perfectly, they would still be:
1) helping perception that ps3 was justified in having blu-ray standard
2) supporting java, a mortal enemy
3) financially supporting numerous competitor organizations/standards
4) looking gimped since it can't be used for games
5) looking more clunky or less elegant with the add-on compare to the ps3
6) looking less competitively priced when people automatically start including the cost of the blu-ray add-on when comparing to the ps3, whether they need it or not
7) competing against their own download store
8) adding support costs
...and so on. I really can't see the point in them going with blu-ray on the 360. The small money they would make off the add-on is a pittance for Microsoft in the grand scheme of things. They would be better off selling a $99 320gb hdd that can be used to download movies, buy stuff of live, etc, rather than a $99 blu-ray add-on that nets them no cash after it's purchased.
Stop looking for "facts" and "evidence", I knew a guy who had a problem... :smile:
RancidLunchmeat
Veteran
Ahh, so it's your position there is no problem with compatibility issues and required firmware upgrades?
The point is that it is superior to DVD quality, and that Sony feels they need a split screen to sell BR over DVD to the mainstream. If Sony is right about that, then selling BR over streaming HD is even tougher.
People only prefer it because theyre used to it. Once they realize they dont need to leave their couch to watch a movie, i'm not sure theyll care about physical media.
You're assuming only one dimension: convenience, which is digital distribution's greatest advantage. In real life, it's the total package that counts.
Blu-ray will continue to face competition from Internet downloaded movies, cable VoD, DirectTV VoD, DVD or what may come tomorrow. The movie market has never been about one single distribution. People can already get HD movies while sitting in their living room today. Yet Blu-ray is still spreading. It's BDA's job to push ahead in a crowded market. They have lowered the player price earlier than anticipated. Movie price has also started to fall (or rather tiered).
If they don't meet their numbers, they will try other strategies. In Japan, Blu-ray recorders already represent 30% of optical playback device sales. In Korea, even DVD has to bow out against Internet movies. The other countries fall in the middle for various reasons. I think BDA's position is that it will take a long time for the world to shift away from physical movies (Many consumers still prefer "hard" goods in the mean time).
But really, this is off-topic from the thread title though.
Blu-ray will continue to face competition from Internet downloaded movies, cable VoD, DirectTV VoD, DVD or what may come tomorrow. The movie market has never been about one single distribution. People can already get HD movies while sitting in their living room today. Yet Blu-ray is still spreading. It's BDA's job to push ahead in a crowded market. They have lowered the player price earlier than anticipated. Movie price has also started to fall (or rather tiered).
If they don't meet their numbers, they will try other strategies. In Japan, Blu-ray recorders already represent 30% of optical playback device sales. In Korea, even DVD has to bow out against Internet movies. The other countries fall in the middle for various reasons. I think BDA's position is that it will take a long time for the world to shift away from physical movies (Many consumers still prefer "hard" goods in the mean time).
But really, this is off-topic from the thread title though.
He didn't say that.
The discs are way more complicated than they used to be, i wouldnt be surprised if we see issues popping up now and then. On the DVD side something strange has happend. Since it got so cheap to author them, amateurs have entered the market and as a result i see more discs with issue now than i did a few years ago, this is small local titles of course.
A write up on the progress is here:
http://dvdfile.com/article/nattering-nabobs-of-negativism-12926
He covers disc prices and sales of course.
RancidLunchmeat
Veteran
No, he just made a snide attempt to cast aside all criticisms of Blu-Ray inoperability as heresay without factual support.
BR has serious firmware and incompatibility issues that should be an embarrassment for all involved at this stage of the release.
Snide attempt? seems your a bit angry?
The question is, should "we" accept that we need update our firmwares on our Blu-Ray players or should we not. Until authoring is streamlined and every hidden secret of failure is known i think it will be a fact of life.
Um, guys, I didn't mean to kick off another religious war, I was just pointing out why a manufacturer wouldn't want to be a small player in the BD business. The simple fact is that authoring studios have limited resources, and they're going to expend those resources where they do the most good, by testing on the players considered to be the most popular.Snide attempt? seems your a bit angry?
The question is, should "we" accept that we need update our firmwares on our Blu-Ray players or should we not. Until authoring is streamlined and every hidden secret of failure is known i think it will be a fact of life.
There are always going to be compatibility problems with BD, the spec is just too loose (not to mention insanely complex), and there are just too many competing implementations. It could easily have been as bad with HD DVD, except for the fact that all our players had the same core code, pretty much. Which meant that the players themselves became the de-facto standard, and new players would have to match their performance, irrespective of what the spec said.
It'll get better for BD as the number of implementations slowly whittle down to the most popular and it becomes cheap enough for a new manufacturer to just license a known good implementation instead of rolling their own. I suspect that's already happening, but I also believe it would be difficult for the XBox to do that due to it not using one of the standard chipsets, so it would be plagued with the same compatibility issues you see the small players having now.
Just for an example, the eventing model in the HD DVD spec was essentially described in a single paragraph, with a reference to the W3C eventing spec - the problem is that the eventing spec has no concept of multiple applications, or default behavious, or levels above document root in the object tree. It took us a huge email thread, and a couple of us sitting down and defining _exactly_ how the events would propagate inside an app, and between apps, and how event capturing would behave before we had something that could actually _work_. A fair number of shipped discs use eventing between apps (essentially every Universal title), and even a slight implementation change in the eventing model would break all those discs.
I'm actually impressed by how _few_ problems the BD folks are having.
I'm not talking about resources, I'm talking about picture quality.
I dont think MS will add an external Blu-ray drive for the 360 (the next Xbox will most likely have a Blu-ray drive anyway), but for most film fans, paid-for digital content will likely remain niche, as not only is the quality inferior to Blu-ray, the prices aren't exactly low. Meanwhile Blu-ray prices are falling all the time.
IMO, the majority of digital content will remain as torrent downloads for the next few years, and this is a much bigger threat to disk-based media than services like Apple tv and Live!
woundingchaney
Regular
woundingchaney
Regular
Older movies as in titles released for some time ago or older movies just now making the transition to BD??
But regardless reasonably good to hear. Prices of BD movies are absolutely ridiculous.
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