why the xbox720 should be using HD-DVD

[NathansFortune]

Why not do the combo Bluray/HD-DVD drive but only use HD-DVD for games & offer a Bluray movie kit(via software download) to support movies? This way MS gets the best of both worlds: less piracy with a dead format & support for the defacto hi-def movie format for only those that want to pay for it.

Tommy McClain

Look at the piracy history of DC. Sega thought they were protected by using GD-ROM, but it didn't help them one bit as multi-plat games were CD sized, and the GD-ROM drive was CD-ROM capable.

In the situation you outline people could download an HD DVD rip of the game, burn it to a Blu-ray and use it in a hacked 360. As of today there are few ways to burn an HD DVD, and this would give MS a very piracy proof console, well disc based piracy anyhow.

 

[eastmen]

Digital streaming will have to be a defacto standard by XBOX 720 then. I find that extremely unlikely.

Bluray wasn't a defacto standard when the ps3 launched. It may not even be a defacto standard when the ps4 launches either.

if enough people enjoy streaming then thats all that matters. You going to have 2-3 years of people using netflix streaming on the 360 and many of them will be buying xbox 720s .

And HD-DVD is faster?

Why throw out specs of generation 1 Blu-Ray? Is MS going for 2005 era BD drives in 2011? You are just re-enforcing my analogy of the lost war..

Sure they can sell the BD playback kit just like the Xbox DVD kit. As long as a Wi-Fi kit isn't another $100, this nickel and dime stuff is great for MS and bad for my wallet.

I listed specs for both players if you bothered to read before putting your sony blinders on.

Also I don't see what generation blu-ray they are going to put out all I know is that There are more hands in the blu-ray pot than just sony and liscensing the tech will allways be more expensive than hd dvd as only one company holds the patents for the technology. There are no longer any movie fees to pay on that format. Since its a dead format they really don't need to adhear to any previous specs or be compatible with anything and they can really change up hardware.

It may be bad for your wallet , but i don't remember you complaining last generation when the xbox had a hardrive and the ps2 didn't and required you to buy memory cards and other things.

If MS goes with HD DVD as a proprietary format they'll be signing a contract with Toshiba and/or other drive manufacturers like LG for tens of millions of them...that's volume. Toshiba could even license their super upconversion tech to MS for DVD playback. Many people prefer not to have to rebuy their whole DVD collection just to get HD

Thats correct. I already know 90% of my dvd collection is not getting replaced. Even now with current pricing i find it hard to justify buying new releases of certian movies on bluray over dvd.

Look at the piracy history of DC. Sega thought they were protected by using GD-ROM, but it didn't help them one bit as multi-plat games were CD sized, and the GD-ROM drive was CD-ROM capable.

In the situation you outline people could download an HD DVD rip of the game, burn it to a Blu-ray and use it in a hacked 360. As of today there are few ways to burn an HD DVD, and this would give MS a very piracy proof console, well disc based piracy anyhow.

Exactly .

And it doesn't even have to be hd-dvd it could just be hd-dvd2 specs. Remember ms isn't tied to any thing thats come before if they choose to go with hd-dvd or have a custom solution built from the ground up.


Bluray has yet to be a factor at all this generation and it may not be a factor next generation either. Download speeds will continue to go up , compression tech will continue to get better and as we go along streaming content will get closer and closer to bluray's image quality

 

[Squilliam]

Does preventing piracy give a console manufacturer more or fewer opportunities in developing nations where piracy is prevalent?

On one hand it lets them price the console itself and the discs at a lower price (Maybe?!)

On the other the people have little disposible income to purchase gamers so does that make the system less popular?

 

[Brimstone]

The XB720 is going to have a lot of momentum thanks to the 360. I really doubt Microsoft is going to start to make funky decisions.

Why make waves when the wind is at their back? Blu-Ray disc replication will be well established, and mass production of Blu-Ray optical drives will be ready to go. A certain percentage of consumers will have a pre-existing library of Blu-Ray movies.

If Microsoft wants people to pay for the license fee, they can sell a seperate remote controller that activates Blu-Ray playback.

 

[eastmen]

The XB720 is going to have a lot of momentum thanks to the 360. I really doubt Microsoft is going to start to make funky decisions.

Why make waves when the wind is at their back? Blu-Ray disc replication will be well established, and mass production of Blu-Ray optical drives will be ready to go. A certain percentage of consumers will have a pre-existing library of Blu-Ray movies.

If Microsoft wants people to pay for the license fee, they can sell a seperate remote controller that activates Blu-Ray playback.

Yea but what % of that % that has a pre-existing library of Blu-ray movies wont have a dedicated bluray player by 2011 ? Thats the thing. You can get bluray players pretty cheap now a days. They hit $200 bucks and will only continue to fall through out the next two years. I would think MS would launch an xbox next holiday of 2011 which means bluray prices will see price drops in holiday 09 , 10 , 11 and you could get them for sub $100 prices when the xbox next finaly drops.

It would be akin to the wii not having a dvd player.

also apparently hd dvd is still in production and actually got warner brothers exlcusive in china

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/03/warner-bros-to-support-chinese-blu-ray-competitor-cbhd.ars

 

[Squilliam]

Furthermore, I think people tend to like having remotes and better sound system interoperatability with their players. I doubt having Blu Ray is going to be a big deal and its not like people are going to need one for their kids bedrooms in a console like with DVD and the PS2.

 

[aaaaa00]

That's an interesting notion.

Take advantage of all the R&D that's already been done into the format, the many HD DVD capable replication lines already out there (currently only being used to make DVDs), and make things harder to pirate as a bonus.

But frankly, I think the HD DVD ship has already sailed and sunk -- without customers other than xbox I think it's unlikely the drives will hit the economies of scale needed to really be cheap -- so IMHO it's unlikely MS will decide to use it.

Then again who knows what might happen...

 

[eastmen]

That's an interesting notion.

Take advantage of all the R&D that's already been done into the format, the many HD DVD capable replication lines already out there (currently only being used to make DVDs), and make things harder to pirate as a bonus.

But frankly, I think the HD DVD ship has already sailed and sunk -- without customers other than xbox I think it's unlikely the drives will hit the economies of scale needed to really be cheap -- so IMHO it's unlikely MS will decide to use it.

Then again who knows what might happen...

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/03/warner-bros-to-support-chinese-blu-ray-competitor-cbhd.ars

 

[SG79]

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/03/warner-bros-to-support-chinese-blu-ray-competitor-cbhd.ars

You've posted the link twice without reading the article. That's not HD-DVD, but a format that exists only in China and WB is using it to try to combat piracy further.

Yea but what % of that % that has a pre-existing library of Blu-ray movies wont have a dedicated bluray player by 2011 ? Thats the thing.

So what? Adding another value to any console isn't exactly a bad thing especially if the drives are cheaper and the copy protection is good enough for MS. BD drives will only get better as have all other optical formats before it. With the current world economy, the BDA will undoubtedly be more aggressive than ever with prices.

MS invested enough money to keep HD-DVD alive for two years, and I highly doubt that they'll want to foot the bill to revive it just to use it as proprietary format. It may make some sense technically but economically, it doesn't one bit.

 

[Nano]

I think it makes much more sense to go with Blu-Ray, which will be the standard and potentially of a considerably higher capacity than now.

 

[corduroygt]

The point of the HD DVD move would be to reduce disc-based piracy, as was the premise of the thread. MS wouldn't publicly state that they're using HD DVD, it would just simply be the 'XBox 360 format.'

Which is interesting, since the PS3 is the only console out there that's not hacked yet. Both the 360 and Wii have been cracked.
Piracy with Blu-ray is not as going to be easy, they have a physical mechanism to separate recordable discs from pressed discs.

 

[Arwin]

It's not just the Bluray discs though that haven't been hacked - the Cell is definitely an important factor as well.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

It's not just the Bluray discs though that haven't been hacked - the Cell is definitely an important factor as well.

Why do you think the Cell is an important factor of this?

 

[-tkf-]

Bluray wasn't a defacto standard when the ps3 launched. It may not even be a defacto standard when the ps4 launches either.

if enough people enjoy streaming then thats all that matters. You going to have 2-3 years of people using netflix streaming on the 360 and many of them will be buying xbox 720s .

It´s the only HiDef format you can buy on a disc, it IS the defacto standard when it comes to High Definition video.

Video on Demand in HD is so fragmented it makes World Peace looks more likely than a united VOD format.

Bluray has yet to be a factor at all this generation and it may not be a factor next generation either. Download speeds will continue to go up , compression tech will continue to get better and as we go along streaming content will get closer and closer to bluray's image quality

Blu-Ray is a factor, how can you say otherwise, it´s been costly and it´s been a positive part of the PS3 as well, it´s been a big factor

Download speeds, compression, it matter less than empty bottles when your thirsty. You need WORLD WIDE SUPPOT to rely on that if you want your Console to play movies. And you need Worldwide internet connections that lives up to the needed speed. And you need ISP´s that doesn´t cap your downloads.

For Blu-Ray i just need money to buy the disc, and it´s mine for ever and ever. Today the PS3 is the only console that can playback High Def movies in every part of the world. I expect that every next gen Console will do the same.

 

[Arwin]

Why do you think the Cell is an important factor of this?

Because if I've understood things correctly, its hypervisor implementation in the PS3 is what has so far kept hackers from looking at just about anything else that matters, including the PS3's encrypted HDD partition and so on. If it had just been BluRay, then the PS3 would otherwise already have been hacked for stuff like homebrew, illegal copying of PSN games, etc.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

(problems with BluRay)...
however lets assume in 2011 we have 12x blurays at at transfer rate of 54MB/s with 2 gigs of ram is 37 seconds , 4 gigs of ram doubles that 74 seconds and if we are lucky enough to get 8 gigs of ram you double that again 148 seconds. (more problems)

Now perhaps toshiba sitting on a format that isn't being used they could possibly tweak hd dvd to meet the requirements of a next gen system. HD- DVD was a format created for launch in 2005. In 2011 i'm sure they could do more with the discs. 45 gig tri layer discs should be more than enough with todays compression. What i wonder about is transfer rates. If toshiba could increase the transfer rates to double or tripple what they are with bluray/hd dvd it may be a no brainer for MS esp if disc costs are low.

Why are you affording Toshiba the chance to progress a defunct optical format and yet expect BluRay to not benefit from continued research? Your points seem imbalanced to me. If 45 GB triple layer HD-DVD is acceptible, than so is a 50 GB dual-layer BRD (and incidentally I think 50 GB will be enough for all of next-gen). If Toshiba can tweak HD-DVD to get 2-3x the performance, than BRD can be tweaked as such. And if not, it's no faster. There's nothing I know of that gives HD-DVD far more room to advanced in performance than any other blue-laser optical technology. The limits are mostly physical, what a polycarbonate disk can be spun at without exploding and how terrible that racket is! Faster performance nedes either a novel storage method that gets higher information density and thus higher bandwidth at the same physical speeds, or abandoning optical formats in favour of something else, most likely electronic.

I'll be very surprised if all three next-gen machines don't use BRD or some derivative. It is a de facto format, as the only universal high-density optical disk technology readily available, unless CBHD manages to get some traction outside of China. I guess a console company could use CBHD as a proprietary format if they're pressing their own discs. However as everyone else has said, BRD is set to have the cost advantage due to mass-production efficiencies etc.

 

[RudeCurve]

VMD is actually a viable option if MS wants to take that route. A 4-layer VMD disc can hold 20GBs using red laser. With blue laser and the option to add more layers as needed think of the possibilities. Even though NME is a tiny company they're selling the players for around $200 and the movies aren't more expensive than Blu-ray. The technoligy is already pretty cheap even without large econmies of scale. I'm pretty sure whoever is manufacturing the drives for NME will be head over heals for a X720 contract for tens of millions of drives. I honestly don't think BR movie playback will be much of a factor nextgen as most people who want BR will already have standalone players.

 

[Quaz51]

like Shifty Geezer say, for optical media it's simple: more density per layer = more potential bandwidth (the bandwidth limit is physical)
BD have the best density per layer of all optical media and of course the best potential bandwidth, over HD-DVD, VMD (very bad density per layer) or CBHD
nextgen need BD or any optical media

 

[Quaz51]

holographic storage have theoretically good potential for game but not ready for good utilizing at low cost on nextgen

 

[RudeCurve]

VMD (very bad density per layer)

5GB per layer using red laser is not bad...that's the same as DVD and nowadays we have 22X DVD drives. Switching to blue laser you'd have 10GB per layer minimum, not as good as BR or HD DVD but not bad either. The main advantage is theoretically VMD can have many more layers than BR.