the beta and VHS mediums were different sizes... i don't see why i'd be that hard to make a single drawer player where if you put it face side up it reads Blu-ray and face down it reads HD-DVD.
Posted on 11/10/2007 3:10:38 AM PST by Las Vegas Dave
FYI : I signed up this morning at netflix, you may wish to check them out for HD-DVD, (they have 350 HD-DVD titles as of this posting).
I saw that Netflix was carrying them... They’re a good deal, I used them for a long time... I’m off to Costco this morning to see what titles they have..
Right.
They DIDN’T learn from VHS vs. BETA.
They DIDN’T learn from laserdisc vs. CED.
They DIDN’T learn from DAT vs. MiniDisc.
They DIDN’T learn from SACD vs. DVD-Audio.
They keep following the same playbook, and they keep losing. One reason I’m betting the outcome of this “race” will be “none of the above.”
the beta and VHS mediums were different sizes... i don't see why i'd be that hard to make a single drawer player where if you put it face side up it reads Blu-ray and face down it reads HD-DVD.
There, fixed it. I have a lot of great Sony products that I enjoy, but they still haven't seemed to learn to stop pushing their proprietary crap when there's a comparable, less expensive solution on the market.
Not correct. LG, for one, makes a machine that will play both. The comparison to the Betamax/VHS differences ignores a key fact. Those two machines had cartridges that were not only physically different in size, but which also had different mechanical structures. HD, Blu, and DVDs, on the other hand, all at least fit in the same hole, they just use different pick ups.
The only apt comparison to the Beta/VHS wars is Sony's corporate arrogance.
Which is one reason I'm picking HD to win the format wars. Sony is just a little bit too greedy.
He’s also reflecting on the Betamax/VHS war.
Beta was ‘betta’, but VHS was ‘cheapa’...and won.
Today Blueray players are marginally ‘better’ but more expensive than HD-DVD.
If I were a Sony exec I’d cut the cost of the Blueray players to increase the odds of winning the battle.
Problem is, they can’t cut the price. Their costs are simply too high, and they don’t have someone like Microsoft on their side with billions of spare $$$ to subsidize the losses.
The war is over. HD won.
I will not get Blu-Ray. My video collection is way to big to start over.
The two disk formats are rival buggy-whip makers beating each other up, without realizing that technology has already moved on. More and more homes are wired for optical fiber
These guys try to hide that vaunted (what, now fourth iteration of) anti-feature, DRM, has been shown to be a total waste of time, money and energy, as was predicted many years ago, and as history has shown (see numerous web articles by or about Cory Doctorow). But no, the rightholders insisted, and adopters of their limited-incremental value material is presumed to pay their bills, despite the fact that it was never part of the consumers' demand.
I think it's silly and misleading that their portrayal is a "stalemate." It should be called what it is: a failure for both of them; a self-inflicted pox on both their houses.
This is not the battle of industry titans bringing forth great new things. This is the battle of two greedy communist dictators out to take rights away from consumers as they're being taxed for their manacles.
There have been hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a business model that 1) was consumer-adversarial, 2) implied customers would not only have to buy expensive players, but 3) would often re-buy media for their favorite movies, and then 4) those customers would have to face stringent restrictions into the future as to where movies they "bought" could be played.
The purveyors of these new containers (BD, HD-DVD) really have brought very little in the way of new technology "to the table." High quality video and audio was already possible without blue-laser or large polycarbonate discs. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD consortia simply built expensive toll-booths around boxes that would play higher resolution, higher data rate incarnations of the same kind of material that has been available for a dozen years, this iteration under AACS lock-and-key, however.
With crippling litigiousness we've seen rightsholders literally attack dealers acting on their behalf and their customers. Kaleidescape, a movie-industry-licensed maker of an expensive media server product was sued by the DVD-CCA, after the latter after-the-fact figured out they'd left a back-door open in their agreement with the former. That oversight threatened their hegemonistic, monopolistic control over DRM. The DVD-CCA lost round one in court, but that hasn't kept them from forcing Kaleidescape to spend more millions in their defense as the DVD-CCA mounts its appeal.
Customers have been slow to adopt for a host of reasons, but it all boils down to these greedy alliances' attempts to renegotiate one-sidedly a transaction for video movies where, in exchange for premium prices for players and media, the user gets a video that on some tvs/displays looks nicer than their standard DVD counter-parts. Many consumers don't have the equipment to be able to appreciate the full-monty of difference between standard and high-definition.
Thankfully, the laundry detergent Tide never garnered the chutzpah of these Hollywood titans, to force all who would like a little increased whiteness in our laundry to buy new washing machines, and in HP-style, using only proprietary little tubs for color and black-and-white. We know that wouldn't fly, because the makers of Tide don't hold a monopoly on the market. Not-to-worry! Though there used to be competition in Hollywood, they've all been banding together to act like a monopoly around this useless blue-laser.
Even if consumers have the equipment, their lack of knowledge keeps them from being able to take full advantage of HD benefits. I know a guy who set himself up with a nice LCD display, DirecTV with HD package, then connected his set-top box using composite video. Six months later he was saying HD wasn't worth it, until I went to his house to look at what he had put together. We fixed it in short order, but he really felt stupid for wasting his money for those six months of subscription.
A record proportion of consumers (not being hand-held by CEDIA members) have returned HD equipment to the place of purchase. Those Best Buy's, and especially the smaller mom-and-pop video and electronics stores have had to absorb a great deal of the brunt of these rightsholders' forays into HD.
In that sense, these HD-DVD and Blu-Ray forays have much in common with Communist economies. The planners-on-high conceived of a scheme to make themselves rich while foisting their products on the little people, all in the wrappings of a business model where, as it became clear, consumers who shared their videos and audio with their friends and family--as they had for decades in the past--were going to be sued and be brought to financial ruin.
Granny, who benevolently had been watching her granddaughter so her daughter could exercise her bread-winning strengths, gets notice that the RIAA, MPEG-LA or some other rightsholders have filed suit against granny for her granddaughters' computer-based recreation. Granny is forced to spend most of her dear departed husband's retirement nest-egg just responding to court procedures, and is prematurely forced into a settlement that seems a victory for the rightholders, but saps granny of much joy and freedom in her twilight years.
In the past, superbit-type schemes at least did not force users to buy new equipment to get an improved picture. But the glorious 16:9 (1.78), though nowhere previous to be found as a film or video format, was introduced to playback 1.85, 2.35, and 1.33. "What are these black bars, other than wasted image?" people asked? "Well,... we'll sort that out later" (for a little extra money--ten thousand dollars per PJ, for example).
Couldn't HD have used DVD-9 disks? Well, yes, they could, and in combination with MPEG-4, and AVC, no one would've been forced to pay for the studios' R&D dabblings in areas they knew nothing about. That's just one of the anti-efficiencies of Communist central planning.
The Chinese now have CH-DVD and AVS, but after years of leaving a festering wound open, Hollywood has settled with the Chinese, vis-a-vis DVD-type royalties, so long as the Chinese don't bring that less-expensive, superior hardware, codec and non-DRM lock-box products onto US shores. Yes, our home-grown central planners are really looking out for our interests, aren't they?
There's plenty of self-inflicted, counter-productive ugly behvior by rightsholders in this so-called stalemate, but it's by no means the direct result of there being two camps. We needn't be any more up in arms about that than we are that Count Chocula and Frankenberry still haven't resolved their competition. I wish they would call a truce...with consumers, dealers, retailers, distributors, and related manufacturers. They need to re-deploy along the lines of where customers' demands are. They need to stop trying to foist their endless succession of DRM schemes and related enforcement mechanisms onto customers who don't want them.
There's plenty of money to be made if they would employ the kind of creative willingness toward change that let open the floodgates of video rental stores twenty-five years ago. Let them get more money by virtue of their properties' ubiquity, rather than its shackles and consumer-adversarial, lawyerly litigiousness. (What an untold financial waste, stifler of innovation, and poisoning of the marketplace that's been!)
They need to find some new money somewhere to end the writers' strike anyway. Let it be in the slivers of new money to be found as innovators distribute many more authorized copies of their products!
HF
I think Walmart just made the case for the HD version by underselling Bluray big time, you can get an HD DVD player for under a $100. Bye Bye Bluray!
A few years ago I purchased a Sony juke-box dvd player which holds 400 discs. I only space for about 50 more. Once that's full, I hope someone comes out on top of this high-def disc war and makes a high-def juke-box similar to the one I have. Of course, now there's this whole Voudu Box thing which I haven't really looked into yet.
And don’t forget cassette vs cartridge, and two incompatible quadrophonic formats.
OTOH, there was an earlier format war, between 33 1/3, 45, and 78 rpm, rivals protected by patents and featuring exclusive artists. By the time I was aware of such things as turntables, each had four available speeds (16 2/3 was also on there, although I’ve never seen such a format disk), and 33 1/3 was king, with 45s used for singles, and 78 dying out (although the first John Fahey album was issued on 78s as part of an elaborate hoax).
oops, forgot to mention the 8mm format, followed by hi-8, both from Sony and very few others.
oh yeah, and I think most remember that almost-a-DVD format with the lower price and limited trial period that Circuit City was pushing less than ten years ago, which lasted about ten months.
In the future, please post these threads in chat.
Thanks.
I don't think the price/gigabyte will catch up with DVD-RW before inexpensive terabyte media and drives become available, outstripping the HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and DVD-RW price/gigabyte ratios in one swell foop.
HF
LOL! So after all the months that Sony was arrogantly braying, “We won! We won! HD DVD is already dead!” - you could pick up the trades and see these pronunciamentos almost daily - Sony is NOW claiming stalemate. Let me see if I can offer a translation: When Sony says, “We won!” it means that the two formats are wildly tussling for supremacy. But when Sony says “It’s a stalemate!” it really means that HD DVD has just delivered a flurry of punches that Sony can neither meet nor fend off.
Whether the knockout blow will be Warner going HD DVD exclusive, or the demonstrated cracking of Blu encryption, or some other death stomp, Sony is without doubt seeing the writing on the wall. Bye-bye spyware (every Blu player is loaded to the gills with nasty bits of code), bye-bye anti-consumer levels of DRM, bye-bye older players that won’t be able to play special features and advanced content, bye-bye overly expensive players, bye-bye vicious viral marketers and Sony-paid shills who spout lies on every forum, bye-bye Blue-Tooth remote that won’t play with other equipment...bye-bye Blu-Ray.
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