Will Warner support Blu-ray?

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rabidrabbit said:
I already covered why I don't think it's that much different whether you have them "at your fingertips" or at arms length.
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Which explains why MP3 took off so fast... People don't want to haul physical media around when they don't have to. I know a lot of people that have their CD collection ripped and the discs stored in the attic. Why? because it is more convienent.

Sure you could just haul disks around, but then you have to store them in a usable manner, risks scratches, take up shelf space, etc.

This affects a relative minority of people, most travel maybe once a year, and even then some couple of hours flights.
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I fly pretty regularly, as do a LOT of other people, and there are a lot of laptops playing movies. There is a reason people don't carry around CD players and a stack of CDs anymore.

And I think your laptops battery life would be the bottleneck there quite soon anyway (or is there electricity plugs in business class, must be, I've never been there), still... only a minority of consumers... etc...
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Well, I get 8+ hours of battery life, and there are seats on some airlines economy class that have power as well.

Anyway, if you copied those 5 30GB HD-DVD's to your laptop... you'd need two laptops to store them :)
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Well, first neither HD-DVD nor BR are shipping. 100 GB drives are pretty standard and will be going to 200 GB by next year. And there is always transcoding, and removing those useless audio tracks and special features.
 
aaronspink said:
Which explains why MP3 took off so fast... People don't want to haul physical media around when they don't have to. I know a lot of people that have their CD collection ripped and the discs stored in the attic. Why? because it is more convienent.
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There's a bit of difference between having a shelf of discs by the TV to pop in the machine, and carrying around a shelf load of CDs to play in your portable music machine though! MP3 isn't just smaller than CD players, which is cool, but lets you carry dozens of CDs without needing the disks. That's not an issue with movies that you'll have the discs stacked somewhere anyway whether you watch from the discs or rip them to HDD. Now if it's case of carrying one HDD with a dozen movies on, or a dozen HDDVDs, then the portable storage makes sense. But who wants to do that?

I'm with the 'no-one's really going to be streaming movies around the house' supporters myself. If I want to watch a movie mostly I watch it on the main TV where it's comfortable. If someone else wants to watch a movie elsewhere and they've got a DVD player, they can take the disc. It's not like exhausting labour, in this time where people are supposed to be getting at least 20 minutes workout a day if they don't want to die of gutrot and couchpotatoitus. And a DVD player is cheaper than a MCE extender! Okay an HD player isn't yet but in 3 years time or whatever you'll pick 'em up for 40 quid, whereas media extenders will always be quite pricey I'd have thought.

Plus if all your films are on a PC and someone's watching one HD movie downstairs and you want to watch one upstairs, isn't the PC going to have issues broadcasting two HD streams? I've never undestood this, how having all your films in one place allows you to watch multiple movies around the house.
 
aaronspink said:
Which explains why MP3 took off so fast... People don't want to haul physical media around when they don't have to. I know a lot of people that have their CD collection ripped and the discs stored in the attic. Why? because it is more convienent.
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Actually I think that MP3 is a really interesting data point, quality of MP3's is significantly lower than those of the original transfers and yet people choose to listen to MP3's because of the convenience factor. It killed DVD Audio and SACD dead before they even had a chance.

I think the siginificant barrier to adoption of HD media (blueray or HDDVD) is the fact that DVD looks really pretty good on a HD set. I certainly doubt the average consumer thinks it looks bad.

I've been moving a lot of my DVD's to HD recently, and although I leave some of the better transfers as raw VOB files, a lot of my collection I'm willing to live with at significantly lower quality just because 700+ discs and packaging take up a lot of space.

I'm not sure the next step in video media isn't media-less distribution in the movie market place aswell. It'll be interestingto see how Apple proceeds with it video iTunes store.
 
Just thought I would like to post this here, instead of making a new thread.:smile:

Taiwanese firm AOpen has claimed that it will begin selling Blu-ray drives for PCs by the end of November, several months before the high-definition storage technology was expected to become available.
As you might expect prices will initially be very high.
'When they are first launched, Blu-ray drives will be sold at a premium,' Mike Chiang, senior director, AOpen told ITP Technology. 'This is no different from when dual-layer DVD writers and DVD/CD-RW combo drives first made their way on to the market. Those drives too were sold at premiums when they were first launched.'
Chiang added that the price of discs will also be high but said that prices will soon begin to fall as supply picks up.
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Link http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/78692/aopen-claims-bluray-drives-by-the-end-of-november.html
 
PC-Engine said:
while iHD gets the same requirement done with less effort. iHD is superior through elegance and simplicity.
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Vacuous assertion on your part with zero support. You don't have any comparitive example on how much effort is required to author a given use case in iHD vs BD-J (or HDMV). Care to demonstrate it without appeal to vacuous and vague FUD?
 
DemoCoder said:
The question is, when will Sony agree to put out content on HDDVD. :) :) :)

RIP HD-DVD.
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I think the real question is along ERP's suggestion. A fair amount of people are ready for online distribution of movies. This number will only grow. If Blu-Ray does not gain critical mass soon enough, there will never be a disc-based successor to DVD.

I, for one, would benefit from a purely online version of Netflix.
 
Inane_Dork said:
I think the real question is along ERP's suggestion. A fair amount of people are ready for online distribution of movies. This number will only grow. If Blu-Ray does not gain critical mass soon enough, there will never be a disc-based successor to DVD.

I, for one, would benefit from a purely online version of Netflix.
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What is a fair amount?

What kind of bandwith is going to be required to download or stream HDTV movie files?

How much will such bandwidth cost?

How much storage will be needed to store a decent-sized library and how much will that storage cost? How many people are ready to pay a bunch of money upfront for that?

Coincidentally, I thought Netflix said today something about its online distribution plans being delayed?

EDIT:

Ah yes, here it is:

http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/s...679.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA
 
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Inane_Dork said:
I think the real question is along ERP's suggestion. A fair amount of people are ready for online distribution of movies. This number will only grow. If Blu-Ray does not gain critical mass soon enough, there will never be a disc-based successor to DVD.

I, for one, would benefit from a purely online version of Netflix.
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There currently only two countries in the world where you could conceivably begin a successful online distribution service: Japan and South Korea - the only countries with sufficiently high speed broadband networks as standard.

The rest of the world is many years behind. The investment in optical cable and re-tooling exchanges is great. The adoption of sufficiently high speed broadband is still not great enough to enable a real threat to optical media formats. This is still at least a decade away from reality.

HDD's with sufficient capacities are prevalent but not standard on the vast majority of PCs. That could well change in the next couple of years.

Ultimately I agree that the physical format will die, but that is many many years away.
 
Finally we have a single standard, which was what everyone wanted. Everyone should be happy right?

Great news for Sony, and the PS3. It certainly will help cement it's dominance, which was a foregone conclusion anyway.

I'm so glad the technically superior format prevailed, even against the DVD Forum. Just shows you, the DVD Forum does not have to be the one to set the next generation standard.
 
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wco81 said:
What kind of bandwith is going to be required to download or stream HDTV movie files?
How much will such bandwidth cost?
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Your missing my point, I'm trying to say that MP3 shows that beyond some level, quality is trumped by convenience.

While myself and a few other audio geeks find MP3's to have intolerably low fidelity, the vast majority of people think they're great.

You can compress AVI's at about 1.5Gb's or better/movie and they really don't look totally horrible. Now 1.5Gb's is still beyond practical for most peoples connections, but if you take DVD as the adoption model, and it was the fastest adopted new medium ever (if you believe the hype). Look how long it took to get 1 million installed standalone players. That's a fair amount of time for a downloadable format to get a foot hold.

Now yes I can tell the difference and I'm positive that if you put 100 people in a room and had them A/B the video they'd all say the HD source was much better. The question though is can a downloadable format be good enough, and be practical enough for widespread adoption while the HD formats are still looking for their feet.

I think that personal video players are the killer app for downloadable movies and the new IPod and more importantly the new iTunes with downloadable mainstream TV episodes is big step towards that.

My personal preference is that one of the "real" HD formats wins, but I think it's a possibility we might be seeing another DVDAudio vs SACD.
 
avaya said:
There currently only two countries in the world where you could conceivably begin a successful online distribution service: Japan and South Korea - the only countries with sufficiently high speed broadband networks as standard.

The rest of the world is many years behind. The investment in optical cable and re-tooling exchanges is great. The adoption of sufficiently high speed broadband is still not great enough to enable a real threat to optical media formats. This is still at least a decade away from reality.

HDD's with sufficient capacities are prevalent but not standard on the vast majority of PCs. That could well change in the next couple of years.

Ultimately I agree that the physical format will die, but that is many many years away.
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I think you short change the current situation by a great deal. I can download a DVD faster than I can get it any other way besides driving to a store. I'm not saying the majority of America is on par with me, but a rising number are. And the number will only rise.

And for three DVDs at a time, like Netflix, only takes 27 GBs, max. I would not be surprised if many people have that amount.

And while you say we aren't there (and I agree), we're moving there fast enough to kill off any slow moving disc format. The real problem is that Hollywood is paranoid of anything like this. There's the bottleneck in the system. Well, consumers can live without movies, but the opposite is definitely not true.

I wish Hollywood would realize that the best way to curb "illegal" uses of media is to make a reasonable way to use it (iTunes being a prime example).
 
I think that though the iPod-style players - and the desire for digital content - may be growing with the public, and the public growing in awareness, Hollywood is justified in being a little paranoid of piracy in this instance.

With iTunes having over 500 million songs sold, and the iPod itself having sold more than 22 million units, that would break down to roughly 23 songs bought via iTunes per iPod.

Now - I know that most iPods have more than 23 songs on them, and I would venture to say that the remainder of those songs don't all come from CD rips. So though the concept is certainly growing, I'm not sure if people are more likely to 'go legal,' or the proliferation of stylish digital players has actually turned more on to piracy. It'll be interesting to see some stats on this a couple of years out.

As for video, we'll just have to seehow that model progresses over the next few years.
 
Umm, in many parts of the US you can get 7Mb/s DSL. I used to have it myself before SBC capped it at 3Mb/s. 7Mb/s is approximately equal to the bitrate of DVD. But if you allow time-shifting of DVD content, than it's already possible today. At 3Mb/s, a 4.7Gb DVD can be downloaded in 3.5hrs, or 7hrs for a dual layer.

True, it can't match South Korea, but SK is a special case, due to population density (most of their population lives in just a few very dense cities) and dark fibre (power utility fibre optics)
 
What does MS hold over HP that HP would forego its patent rights over BD-J if iHD replaces it?

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2005/tc20051020_154892.htm

When Microsoft announced its support for HD DVD in September, it was HP's turn to be livid. That's because Microsoft had professed its neutrality, after HP had brokered an earlier deal for the Blu-ray group to use another piece of Microsoft technology, it's VC-1 video "codec," which is used to compress data onto a disk and then decompress it so it can be viewed by a consumer.

But now, after two weeks of tough negotiations, HP has basically given in on two key points. First, it agreed to propose that Microsoft's iHD replace its own Java-based interactivity software. That's in part because major movie studios prefer iHD, which was built from the ground up by Microsoft and Disney (DIS) for optical disks. HP's code was built on top of an older, more complex technology that was originally designed to work on set-top boxes, says Richard Doherty, Microsoft's senior program manager for media, entertainment and technology convergence.

"It's enormously complicated," says Doherty "and two-thirds of it is of no use on optical disks. [That's why] the majority of studios prefer iHD." HP wouldn't disclose how much it will forego in the way of potential royalties, but, Weber says, "we're willing to broaden our strategy and give up on some of our own technology to make sure we can make Blu-ray and HD-DVD compatible for the future."
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