It's Beta-max vs. VHS all over again
 

After much posturing and attempts at negotiation, the first official shots in the next generation DVD war have been fired. Toshiba has announced plans to sell a HD DVD player in March (backwards compatible with current DVDs), while Sony, Fox, and Lionsgate have annonced a handful of DVD titles which they will be releasing in Blu-ray format exclusively, the competitor to HD DVD. The titles will, of course, still be available in the current standard DVD format as well.

Personally, I'm going to sit back and let the dust settle. I'm not one to jump on these kinds of emerging technologies. They're buggy, over-priced, and in this case there's a 50% chance of near-term obsolesence. I'll wait until one goes the way of the Laserdisc.

link

I'm with you. Wait and see. All I know is that I'm not rebuying my movies yet again: Beta --> VHS --> DVD. No thanks.
:)

VHS --> Laserdisc --> DVD for this filmgeekboy.

I don't give a hoot about increased picture quality at this point, or room for more extras. My TV - that I cannot afford to replace - won't display things any better anyway. And until I replace every one of my laserdiscs with a more modern format, I'm not willing to part with the only player that can play both lasers and DVDs.

No bite from me this time. Go fish.

Read as "releasing in Blurry format".

We never ended up with many video tapes but we jumped full into DVD collecting. I'm not interesting in starting over. I'm still waiting for obscure titles to be released on DVD. I'm a part of the wait and see crowd as well.

Ah to recollect the current collection - yeah it's a ways off, as is the HDTV we'll need to play them on.

We still have our Laser Disc. Spent $800 on the sucker (Pioneer Elite). It's been acting funny so I gotta see how many of the movies I can burn to DVD (recently acquired a DVD recorder).

BTW: I just noticed that the title of the thread is incorrect. It should read "Betamax vs. VHS".

And FWIW: Betamax never actually completely died - it is still used quite a bit in professional video.

Oops, went a bit brain dead there.

And yeah yeah, whatever about video editing, it's the consumer market we're talking about here.

As a comsumer, I stick by the fact that the quality of the Betamax picture was/is far superior to VHS. (That's why lots of TV shows etc used it to record long into the 90's and early 00's.)
:)

Heheh, however ... DVD was a big improvement over laserdisc.

(Although, I miss the way laserdisc movies would simply BEGIN when you inserted the disc. No menus, no commercials, no THX trailer, often no FBI warning. Ah, simpler times. Far fewer extras, but I appreciated the way I could geekly replicate a movie-going experience.)

Which is exactly why I will make zero gambles until one of the two takes hold. I don't care how convinced I am that one or the other technology is "better", you never know which will win the general public's favor.

Wait, I thought you said there were no ads before the movie on the laserdisc.

I'm waiting for a hybrid unit that will play Blu Ray AND HD as well as regular DVD, laser disc, CD, and LPs.

For under $100

And I'll bet that hundred dollars the one to succeed, if either do, will be the one that's backwards compatible with regular DVD.

Consumers are simply not ready to replace the DVD collections they are just beginning to term "collections." Even if Blu-Ray wows the tech-geeks, Joe Blow Consumer is not going to let his DVDs go the way of the 8-track just yet.

Frankly, neither format is going to be offering the kind of improvement over DVD that Joe Blow will roll over for. Perhaps it would have been better to wait the few years till all analog signals disappear from the consumer realm. HDTV will have near universal penetration by then (or by 2 weeks after the analog cut-off) ... and perhaps a format that offers a slightly better picture quality might have a chance at that point.

That's still a big perhaps.


As for more room for extras - - well I've already got 96 hours of running commentary on my Lord of the Rings DVDs plus 544 hours of documentaries and such. Do I really need the extra "extras" room that a new format would provide?

hehehehe. He said Penetration.

Do we really need any sharper pictures in the world of porn, as so many of the stars get even older and wrinklier?

I think the FCC deadline for digital transmission is July of this year, though cable companies can get an extension if they request it. I know pretty much all of LA is digital already, with analog being transmitted just for the people who don't have a box or CableCARD.

Also, having extra room means that the Lord of the Rings will be able to fit on two DVDs instead of like 50. Which, in turn, results in lower costs, which would hopefully be passed on to you.

and "blow"!

Ah, but the analog cut-off has been pushed back to 2009, after being pushed back twice already. Who knows when it will really happen.

:cool: Hahahahahahahah! Uh-huh, just like the lower costs of CD were passed on to us. Ahahahahahahahahah!

:D From www.Blu-ray.com (not Sony):
(Emphasis mine)
My disclaimer -- I work for Sony but not in Electronics...

Do you work for their lingerie and linens division?




I didn't know Sony did anything besides electronics.

I'm just reminded about how how the metric system is coming by... when was it? 1978 or something?

1976

Sony Pictures. Old Columbia studios in Culver City...

Black-and-white -> Color is a closer analogy. Of course, they were clever enough to find a standard which accomodated BOTH technologies for that conversion, which made the transfer seemless and painless. Not really a possibility in this case.

My analogy wasn't to the technology, but rather the promised changes - back in the 60s we spent a lot of time learning about the impending conversion to the metric system and all we got was liters of coke.

And it screwed me up mathmatically for eternity.

Nonsense - it's all powers of 10

I work for a CD & DVD Duplication/Replication company, and part of what I do is research the latest trends in the industry. I may end up eating my words, but I am betting that Blu-ray will come out on top. A lot more news, studio support, and progress has been coming out of the Blu-ray camp.

To sum it up:
Blu-ray - Revolutionary
HD DVD - Evolutionary

I don't plan on replacing all the DVDs I currently have. Once one of the high-definition formats comes out as the winner and I eventually buy a player, I will simply add to my collection with the new format; the original DVD technology will be backward compatable.

Anybody who is interested in keeping up on the latest news with this, may be interested in the list of articles that I maintain: http://www.discburn.com/newsletters/

Sounds like you are too close to the trees to see the forest...

Beta was better technically than VHS. VHS won because it was cheaper.

The original mac was technically better than the PC. The PC won (market share wise) because it was cheaper.

It's the same thing here, Joe couch potato will not know a Blue-Ray from a Sting-Ray but when he sees the major price difference the HD-DVD player is coming home with him.

I predict HD-DVD in a landslide for the above reasons and because I like Blue-Ray better. History has shown that I always back the wrong horse. So excuse me while I go watch some old beta tapes...

There may only be a price difference at the very beginning. From what I understand in the industry's One-To-One magazine, the players won't have significant price differences. What will have the price differences initially are the costs of the discs themselves (though Sony denies this).

The reason is because existing replication equipment can be easier adapted for HD DVD. Blu-Ray requires more investment, which will most likely lead to higher prices at first.

If HD DVD wins, it will be because of price, and price alone. But the way the news sounds, more studios are backing Blu-Ray than are backing HD DVD. That means a lot. As weird as it sounds, the porn industry will end up being the ones having the most say. Whichever one they decide to back will most likely be the winner because of the tremendous economic impact the porn industry has.

Consumers won't be the ones determining the winner of this war.

Err, umm.....

Gotta disagree with you on this one. I won't make a prediction about which will win, but in the end, it will be consumers that decide it. All the exact same arguments were made for beta-max. Studio support, better technology, eventual price convergence, yadda yadda. But if the consumer wants nothing to do with it, it's going nowhere.

Ohh and from a more technical point of view...

What are you going to play full res Blue-Ray DVD's on anyway? There are not a lot of 1080p TV set's in living rooms yet and for the few that do have them they all have HDMI ports that cannot handle 1080p.

That reminds me; I gotta pee

The discs do have a manufacturing price... a few cents apiece, and are extremely marked up from there. A couple pennies per disc makes a big difference when you are pumping out large quantities.

I highly doubt that a consumer would want nothing to do with it. Higher capacity is always coming down the road... 5.25 gave way to 3.5, which gave way to CD, which is giving way to DVD, which will give way to either HD DVD or Blu-Ray.

With that said, I firmly believe that the porn industry will choose the winner. I heard a report on NPR a couple years ago that the porn industry is stronger than the average person thinks, and has had its say over many multimedia formats over the years.

Again, I make no predictions on which one will be adopted. You may be absolutely right, this time the public, being more tech-savy as a whole than 30 years ago, may be won over by the better technical specs. Then again, maybe not.

But in the end, it is a 100% guarantee that if consumers want nothing to do with with one of the two for whatever reason, it will fail.

Does anybody still make 8 tracks? I haven't been to the music store in a while and my Helen Reddy is getting a little overplayed.

I recently bought a HDTV and decided to save a grand by going for 720p over 1080p. I do admit that I am in love with the set (if I wasn't already married...) and I often find myself watching HD versions of things that I would have passed on in SD. I went out and bought a DVD player that upscales SD DVDs with a Faroudja processor so I can at least not lose any quality when watching 'em on a big screen.

However excited I am by the upcoming hi-definition DVDs, I have to remind myself of all of the formats I've seen come and go through the last couple of decades. Anyone remember MiniDiscs? What about the very recent SACDs? When I worked for Island Records, we were pulled into a meeting to hear about Philips' new DCCs. We were told that the amount of money being invested in this technology meant that they were sure to succeed. Right.

Like other posters in this thread - I am thrilled at the idea of a new format that improves upon the existing available one. And I'll probably start buying the media a month or two after it becomes available (and the player prices break the $200 barrier) - but there's no way I'm going to play armchair quarterback and try to predict which format will out. The only thing that's certain is that the experts are almost always wrong.

DIVX, anyone?

Other than the boneheads evangelizing the format (and the unfortunate few suits who headed major studios), did anyone really think DIVX was going to make it?

Ps.. For anyone that wants to dig into the guts of the HD craze I know a good site for that... http://www.highdefforum.com/ Them folks know HD like you folks knows DLR...

Heh, now that you mention it...the porn industry was quite big (hehehe) on DIVX. Kinda puts a hole in the "the winner will be determined by the porn industry" theory.

Kevy Baby must have been big on DIVX.

I liked MiniDisc.


That said ... capacity is NOT going to be an issue for theatrical DVDs. How much more bonus material can there possibly be? The most popular DVD extra, the running commentary, can already fit quite comfortably on the current format. Heck, some DVDs have three or four frelling commentaries. After that, there's only so much behind-the-scenes featurettes and deleted scenes that can be found.

So the question really becomes whether everyone is ready to throw away their relatively new DVD collections for slight picture improvement. I, for one, don't think so. In this regard, even considering the lack of studio backing, HD DVD has the huge advantage in being compatible with regular DVD.


CDs may have replaced vinyl ... but only after vinyl was out for over 40 years. Everything since CD has failed in the audio world. DVDs have replaced VHS ... over 30 years later. It's way too soon for other formats to do anything but fail.

Just to clarify, HD DVD is not compatible with regular DVD. Blu-Ray has the capacity to be compatible with DVD format, as a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc can have high-def content on one layer, and regular DVD content on the other layer. Many studios plan on releasing movies this way. This allows for a one-sided disc with all the content on one side, and the disc print on the top.

The only way that HD DVD can be compatible with DVD format is to have one side of the disc with the HD content, and then flip the disc over for the standard DVD content. There are several problems with this though, namely that mastering fees are quite high to have a dual-sided disc as it is and the mastering fees will be even higher with different types of content on each side of the disc. Other problems with this include that the disc is more vulnerable to being scratched up, and you can only have a surface print on the inner hub of the disc.

I think ISM ment that HD-DVD players will also play current DVD's. However I think that Blue's will also but don't quote me on that.

Oh, ok. Blu-ray players are/will also be compatible with DVD.

Deluxe Indigo-Violet Xylophones? Loved 'em!