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Blu-Ray had a "x free bds" promotion themselves a while back, so don't read too much into this.

Well, seemingly Warner were also close to going HD DVD exclusive; apparently it's Fox pulling out of talks to go neutral that (partially) convinced Warner to take up the BDAs offer instead. Supposedly Toshiba tried a last ditch "can't refuse" offer last night with Disney to get them on board.

Regardless, this is the cost of being an early adopter... I had a 3DFX graphics card back when they were bought out too, I got over it

Last edited by TSThomas on 05 Jan 2008 - 23:28

know all about that. I bought a Syquest Syjet for $500 (and 4 cartridges for around $80 a piece.) They went out of biz a couple years later. Do'h still have 3gb I'm trying to get off them but XP wants to write to them and they happen to be full

Well another sony play i smell. they are such a$$holes it hurts. I know one thing blu ray sucks and blu crap is not even a stable format .. i read they need to release a blu ray 2.0 format to even compair to HD but all the fools who bought ps3 wont be able to use the blu ray 2.0 due to a complete format change and there 1.0 player is usless.

For the Record: HD was a much better format, I know I had both until i took back the ps3, HD was cleaner and much better in so many way .. region free was great.

But sony, is and will always be a joke. I will never buy anything sony, they need to come down from there high hourse.

Personally, I will wait till the asian markets release HD formated movies, or ill just reformat the blu ray movies to HD. Good old netflix

Warner needs to get its head out of sony ass too. Bunch of suck ups.


I dont know why i am complaining I never buy movies anyways lol ..

................ Download completed.


RIP...................


Burn ......................................completed

Send back to block or netflix

lol

EDIT: Nevermind me, I don't seem to have a clue about what I'm talking about, so I'll shut up now!

Last edited by Xerxes on 06 Jan 2008 - 10:25

It "looks" better. But "aitch dee dee vee dee" doesn't sound good to me at all xD

Well, I've always thought the opposite. While yes, HD-DVD was easier to relate to DVD, which logically made it the better name but Blu-Ray just sounds so much cooler. Not to mention as well that the name "Blu-Ray" just rolls off your tongue while "HD-DVD" doesn't (as well).

Well, they are selling much better so I'm not sure what your point is.

I think they're both losers personally, they are niche products like Laserdisk was. I think most people are perfectly satisfied with DVD, I know I am. That may change in the future, but it may be streaming media that really takes over.

HDTV is in pretty high demand, so I don't consider these niche products. More like products that have been held back by the format war. Things could change for the better during 2008. I'm hoping especially recordable discs to go down in price next. Blu-ray burners are OK where they are for me, although further declines in price would of course be a nice bonus.

HDTV is in such high demand that Best Buy's circular last week was filled with HD televisions that were marked down to almost half price. It's the manufacturers that are demanding it.

No its consumers... trust me.

I work at a best buy in the home theater department... we can't keep the things in stock.

Well there are players now that can play both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Well they had to though, they couldn't really go up there and stand around with nothing to say. Whatever they had planned was completely changed by Warner's sudden announcement. Plus the only thing people would be asking them would have been about Warner and what they're going to do now. They obviously didn't have those answers.

Far more than the PS3 owners, I can assure you. This is the first steps to being able to rely on ANY HD format.

Turns out downloading the amount of data stored on blu-ray wont be quick nor viabe for ISP's. Anything remotely close to mass world wide consumer take up of downloading feature length HD content is a pipe dream you have. Next you'll tell me wired networks are dead because wireless will take over, as if we had enough bandwidth to support that aswell.

Can you be more specific? What formats? The protective DRM? This can already be decrypted like the region coding of DVD could be; the region coding, AACS, and BD+. And HD-DVD wasn't much better, it just had less of it. But you still had to decrypt those discs too, so it's not like those allowed you to skip that procedure if you wanted copies. And if you can't skip the procedure in either case, there's no extra work for you really, just your decryption program. A pretty minor inconvience in other words, at least if we compare to HD-DVD.

If you talk of other "formats", I don't really see what you mean, because both the audio and video codings on Blu-ray discs are as standardized as on HD-DVD's. It's just the regular Dolby Digital, H.264, MPEG-2, VC-1 encodings, and a few more optional ones.

Last edited by Jugalator on 06 Jan 2008 - 12:54

My feelings aren't to do with whether people can hack the format or not, it's the end user experience of people who just want to watch their films and use them how and when they want, as you would expect of a video or any other pre-drm media purchased legitimately, without having to re-encode/transcode whatever, or in fact even own a PC.

Sony have been trying to tie people into their awful overpriced formats for years (memory stick duo etc) and the idea of them having a monopoly with an important media standard instead of something ignorable like the memory stick is genuinely very scary.

The memory stick lays in a tiny little portion of the market as better, cheaper alternatives were easily available and supported by countless manufacturers of consumer goods, even to the point that some of Sony's own equipment had to conceed and include readers for other products (SD). The price was also driven down due to competition.

This won't be the case with movies, the industry (and the consumer) wants ONE format, and the industry wants to back one format and keep it going for a good long time to maximise their profit and distribution, they won't be randomly supporting new upcoming formats no matter how much better they may be unless they genuinely think there will be a market shift to them, which wont be for a loooong time as everyone will be happy with their investment in collections of high def dvd's that are 'good enough' compared to whatever the new format will offer.

It's also not about what you can do with it NOW, but what THEY will try and do with it later (see the sony rootkit etc, and other new DRM schemes not disclosed to the end user pre-purchase, produced by sony, including DVD-DRM schemes that don't work on even brand new Sony players) at least on the CD front they are not allowed to call their crippled disks 'CD's' as they don't own the rights to the technology, with blu ray it won't be the same.

It's all been discussed at great length before, HD dvd may well be DRM'd to all hell and back, but I trust the group behind it, far more than I trust Sony who I have no faith in what so ever to even so much as consider consumer rights and fair use.

In general as a consumer I want to put my money towards good innovative technology that stands out on it's own, and is likely to be improved if necessary later, not something that is 'good enough', 'ok' or maybe even 'exceptional' for the time, but seeks to overcome it's faults that may be apparent now, or only in the future, solely by ensuring consumer lock-in. HD-dvd is looking for a monopoly also, but I certainly see it as the lesser of two evils after Sony's track record.

yakumo, you are a fool. CD was invented by Sony and Phillips. Sony hold more rights in the CD world than they do in the Blu-Ray world. You are your own worst enemy in these discussions.
The fact the PS3 is such an extremely popular Blu-Ray player does not make the format a "Sony" format. It was developed by many companies and is controled by many companies.

PLEASE stop doing this to yourself. You do not need or want two formats, Toshiba went against the grain of everyone else and caused this war. Thankfully it is over with the rightful majority side winning.

Sony, especially with their PS3 commitment by far have the biggest vested interest in blu ray though, and the PS3 is the only machine that meets profile 1.1, AND 2.0 bluray requirements. (another shining Sony example of consumer friendliness, love that Patent #6,816,972 ?, 'DRM software that could prevent PlayStation 3's from playing used or borrowed games' what else is up their sleeves?)

It's not a Sony monopoly, it's a format monopoly (blu ray or nothing for high def IF they win), and I just don't want a company like Sony having such large influence with the movie media monopoly.


Venturer and LG also produce HD-DVD players, and there's also the Microsoft drive if you own a 360, it's not Toshiba only. (Though i don't know if either camps actual drives are made by any individual or a subset of the companies involved)

it's a format monopoly

So by your terms DVD is a SDTV on disc monopoly then.

I guess we should have had competing formats for that as well?

Guess what? We almost did. Toshiba's SD disc and Sony/Philips MMCD. But Sony saw there was more support for SD disc (namely Panasonic), did the right thing and unified both formats into what we call DVD (certain error correction & audio techs from the Sony/Philips side, as well as multi-layering).

When it came time for HD media, Toshiba got greedy (they have patent majority on DVD) and went alone against the overwhelming majority of the consumer electronics industry. I didn't even mention computer companies like Dell & Apple being solid BDA members...

PS: Panasonic, founding member of the BDA, actually has more patents in Blu-ray. They also have authoring, disc replication, recorders, players, and (in Japan) PCs. Yet that doesn't stop folks from calling it a "Sony" format.

Last edited by PeterTHX on 07 Jan 2008 - 09:03

With the level of technology, consumer-restrictions possible in regular DVD it was FAR less of a worry.

no