Posted on 02/21/2008 11:58:00 AM PST by Recovering_Democrat
NEW YORK — The HD DVD is now the Highly Dead DVD.
Toshiba Corp., creator of the HD DVD, dropped out of the battle Tuesday over the next generation of movie-disc technology and conceded to the rival Blu-ray format from Sony.
It was the biggest battle between two video formats since Betamax lost out to VHS in the 1980s.
In the long run, the end of the latest format war is expected to be good for consumers, who will no longer have to agonize over which technology to choose for high-definition movies, and won't have to go to the trouble and expense of buying two players.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Has anyone seen a blu-ray player that plays both DVD formats and VHS too?
Has anyone seen a blu-ray player that plays both DVD formats and VHS too?
Another BS article about the ‘format wars’.
The article insists that the Blu-ray victory is good for consumers, then goes on to state, “...it will take 12 to 18 months for Blu-ray players to become as cheap and full-featured as HD DVD players.”
Wonder what consumers are going to say when they find out Blu-ray only works over HDMI 1.3.
ping
They'll say "I wonder what that means?" then hand over their plastic to the salesman.
It’s good for consumers in the sense that there will now be only one standard format, hence no situation where movies from certain studios only play on one format — the format that you didn’t buy. No more agonizing over which technology to buy and trying to second-guess which one will have legs and therefore protect your investment. Now the choice is clear.
Do you mean VCD format? You aren’t really asking about playing a VHS tape?
It seems that Tosh didn't make the right moves strategically, which happens. MS had it's part in this loss, giving only lukewarm support, which ultimately doomed the effort.
Sony on the other hand, was just hellbent on not loosing another format war. When they lost the beta/vhs war, they went out and spent tons of cash to buy and hold a movie studio, which is THE key to winning a format war. It's all about content at the end of the day.
In the mean time Tosh and Sony still do lots of business together, and the only real victims are consumers like me :(
Nothing personal of course.
None of the media coverage about all this seems to mention the one thing I care about. Will my existing collection of DVDs run on these new machines? I have no need for higher definition or “new functionalities”. I’m just sick of electronic media marketers making everybody’s collections obsolete every few years. It’s getting difficult to find a CD player already.
Ther is one safe bet if you want a Blu Ray player that will keep up.
The PS3 is perhaps one of the better Blu Ray players on the market due to its upgradeablity and general hardware decoding power.
It also offers the best results in upscaling standard DVDs.
I have one that I use as my primary movie player. It also has an advantage in that sooner or later there may be a PS3 game worth playing.
Not yet, if you are thinking of havibg a dual player for tape and disk with a way to copy tapes to disk.
I am looking for one myself, that includes the digital tuner to record off-air or cable HD, but there’s none out there yet.
yes bluray and HD-DVD players will play old dvd’s just fine.
VH what? I haven’t touched one of those in years.
On all the crapola commercials for blu ray, they say that regular dvd's will play on "existing" blu ray players.
I’m glad they have decided on single format, but will probably not buy a blue-ray drive till fall.
couple things have to happen first:
Prices of players come down. I saw Sony player at best buy this weekend for $399.00
Prices of blue-ray movies comes down to standard dvd prices.
I heard that a major upgrade is supposed to be coming in the fall for player hardware.
Every few years? The compact disk has been on the market for over 25 years.
The DVD has been around for 15 years, and isn't likely to disappear real soon yet.
The Blu-Ray players I have seen also play DVDs and even audio CDs. However, even if they didn't cheap DVD players will still be available for quite some time.
Not only will your old DVDs play on it, but some (if not all) of the Blue Ray players upgrade your old DVDs, to show them on HDTV televisions.
I am amazed at the quality of the picture I get from my old DVDs.
The Blue Ray formatted DVDs are excellent, but I’m probably not going to go out and purchase all my new movies in that format for now. The price will have to drop before I will go that route.
For the first time I saw the Picture in Picture feature. I loved it!
We were watching YouTube and there were new behind the scenes “Making of Hairspray” posts. They were taken from the HD disks.
When they showed black and white films of the making of the song, they ran the actual movie in a small box at the bottom. In this way, you could see the actors putting the scene together at the same time that scene from the movie was playing. It was facinating. Makes me want to buy one when Blu-Ray gets the PIP.
We have every edition of this movie, the Two disk special edition and the Walmart disk, yet this was something we have never seen before. I so want it!!!! If Blu-Ray were to get an internet connection, one of our special features disks sends exclusive pictures when put into a computer. I would love to see these on my plasma!
(and yes, if anyone is wondering, I did fast a day to get a day of Hairspray)
Whats the point? If you have any home VHS tapes, it's easy to get the hardware and software to convert it to digital video and burn them to DVD. For anything that was comercially released, get a new copy on DVD or Blu-ray. VHS has half the resolution of broadcast NTSC video, so its really not worthwhile to convert commercially available material from VHS to Blu-ray.
I still have lots of VHS’s of movies that are probably not on DVD or are hard to find. The foreign films from Europe are reaching towards the $40 range because of the sinking dollar. Haven’t seen a blu-ray disc as yet, am interested in the quality difference.
Wonder if 3-D discs will come out? Beuwolf in 3-D was amazing.
Thanks for the advice, I’ve thought of getting a machine which will convert VHS to DVD. But the quality won’t change, and it would be time consuming, so I’d limit the number of films I’d transfer.
It's cheaper to get video capture hardware that connects an existing VHS or Beta deck to the USB2 or Firewire port of your computer than to get a stand alone VHS/DVD burner. While a VHS tape must be captured in real time, the setup is the only part requiring user intervention. Once you set up a transfer to your hard disk, you can use your computer for other tasks while the capture to MPEG-2 happens in the background.
That consumer friendliness, I think, is why studios lined up behind Blu-Ray. Even when HD DVD standardized the triple-layer disc that holds more data than Blu-Ray, they kept moving to away from HD DVD. Why? HD DVD's encryption was cracked sooner--I think Blu-Ray hasn't even been cracked yet--and HD DVD had no region coding. HD DVD/DVD combo discs allowed people to buy a movie once for a small premium, and have it on both SD and HD formats. The HD DVD format corrected some problems that slowed the initial uptake of DVD; no region encoding encouraged import/exportation, and the combo discs meant that DVD owners could continue buying movies without worrying about obsolescence. These were very good things for consumers but bad things for the studios.
With Blu-Ray's win, it may be harder to back up your HD movies, and you will be forced to buy multiple copies if you want to watch your movie on both your HDTV and your "legacy" players (DVD player, computer, portable, etc.). It's a win for the content owners, and I salute them for that. I salute them with only one finger, but it's a salute nonetheless.
I refuse to buy any media that I can't perfectly copy for back-up and format shifting, just on principle, so I've just been ejected from the HD-buying class. Thanks a lot, Hollywood.
Is that the d@mn near 100.00 cable that we had to buy to get our Plasma tv to work right????
This post above this is for you.
Sorry, post 27 was not for you but for tripitaka.
I refuse to buy any media that I can't perfectly copy for back-up and format shifting, just on principle, so I've just been ejected from the HD-buying class. Thanks a lot, Hollywood.
AMEN to your entire post. A toast to the freedoms lost. Viva La Revolucion!
I have both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Paid $799 for the HD-DVD and now a decent HD-DVD player can be bought for $99. Oh well, tis the price paid to ride the bleeding edge.
BTW, although the video quality is stellar, my $1000 Sony Blu-Ray player may be the clunkiest piece of electronics gear I’ve bought in the past 20 years. Takes 2-3 minutes just to boot up, another minute or two to load a movie, etc.
I am indeed glad to see the war ending.
MM
I miss the simplicity of VHS tapes.
Just put it in and hit play.
No waiting for stuff to load
or figuring out menus
or other human intervention needed.
They were great for the kids...
Just put it in and watch it - simple as pie.
Blu Ray will end up sucking because they’ll be internet-dependent devices that won’t play the movies you buy without phoning-home to verify the Digital Rights.
My current DVD player plays dvds,cds, but more importantly to me, it plays SACDs and DVD-A which I hope any future Blu-Ray player will read and play too. Especially SACD.
Yeah, I’ll concede that the BD disk format is superior to that of the HD-DVD, in terms of storage capacity. I don’t understand how a media format rushed to market before it was even fully complete and finalized could be considered superior to one that was, however. I guess Sony learned from MS getting the jump on them with the Xbox 360 over the PS 3. Can’t say I really care one way or the other - I don’t even watch a lot of movies, even on regular DVD.
Oh I still have an 8 track player that works.
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