Posted on 01/12/2008 11:34:47 AM PST by LibWhacker
When asked why current players were released to the market when in such a primitive state, manufacturers blamed the release of HD DVD and said it forced them to come to market too soon.Since the announcement that Blu-Ray had picked up an exclusive with one of the major studios, I'd been wondering how a Sony brainstorm would muck up all its advantages. :')
Regarding current Blu-ray player owners, Blu-ray developers told BetaNews, "They knew what they were getting into." Representatives at the Blu-ray booth at CES told BetaNews that the PlayStation 3 is currently the only player they would recommend, due to upcoming changes to the platform. But Pioneer, Samsung, Panasonic and Sony have all been selling standalone Blu-ray players to customers.
I’m holding off on all of this until the industry gets itself sorted out. Glad I didn’t buy a plasma screen two years ago for $8,000.
What would be the reason to upgrade when you only have farmer vision available? This luddite can buy a "old" HD large screen TV for around $99 these days and be happy renting the odd movie now and then for the next 20 years.
As far as TV reception goes, the six or so free channels I get with rabbit ears has the same content of reruns, ET, Hollywierdo "news" that those with 300 channels (of the same crap) cable service have, but I don't spend all that money on monthy cable fee's and keeping up with the latest gadgetry.
Of course, if you live in the city the TV set becomes much more important, it's too dangerous to go outdoors in the evening after work, and all that expensive TV equipment needs to be guarded. It makes life in city apartment prisons more bearable I would imagine, and from the governments perspective the boob tube keeps people off the streets, making policing less expensive. The more obsessed people get with their "entertaqinment" pacifiers the better, and now people can hook up their Wii and get exersized as well, all without leaving their cells.
The B&E artists don't bother with my old magnavox (color) TV, power rabbit ears and $29 dvd player I bought at walmart. They prefer to skip the house altogether and break into the garage to go after more worthwhile things like my snowmobiles riding mowers and quads.
Bingo! And when satellite HDTV transmission is the standard/norm. It's going to be a one-shot purchase on all brand new audio-video configured and working in harmony. Until then, I'm sticking with my three CRT tvs.
I've read that netflix will be offering a new service...eventually...whereby you choose your movie online, and the movie is sent to your TV via a converter box. Or something like that .(I'm not particularly tech-oriented.) Sounds interesting, though.
Right now, today, a 500 GB hard drive can be had for $120. If it holds 20 movies, that is $6 each. Any bets on what a bigger drive will cost next year?
Those optical discs have to be pretty cheap to beat that. My bet is that the wave of the future is downloading both sales and rentals.
As far as losing DRM'd movies goes, I know people who have hundreds of VHS tapes. That "investment" is going to be worthless in a couple of years when VHS players go the way of the dodo.
At least with movies on a hard drive, your kids won't get peanut butter on it and let the dog lick it off.
Any bets on when real 3-D technology becomes available? Not the kind with hokey special glasses, but some kind of a miniature stage in your living room with 3-D actors in 3-D settings. That will make all previous video players and formats obsolete overnight.
I'm sure someone here familiar with all the techno speak can explain it all.
Regardless, that's why this format issue is a problem. There's a lot of expensive gadgetry people wouldn't want to buy over again should we see another beta/ vhs scenario.
When iMovies comes about, this will all be moot...
I bought a Toshiba AD-H3 & the owners manual has several pages of EULA for the open source software they are using (either GNU or some flavor of Linux). Smart move in a way, not having to write their own.
Not too much different from the VCR wars... Beta I, Beta II, and Beta III were different and Beta I players would not handle Beta II tapes. Etc. Similar things happened on the VHS side.. at least, with the BluRay, the discs will still play the movies on the version 1.0 players.
You're right that the CES CEA believing it (or at least putting it out in a press release certainly doesn't make it so. I also agree physical media will be around for a long time.
These Hollywood types and display and receiver manufacturers just haven't figured out that they're killing themselves via the complexities they're trying to foist onto the consumer. They're all trying to be the RCA's David Sarnoff who coined the aphorism that "RCA doesn't pay royalties; we collect them!" Modern HDTV biz-types still drool over the fact that in '53, RCA was collecting 77% of all royalties paid out in radio-TV, more or less guaranteeing their future financial success.
Hence, they've got all these proprietary what-nots, be it DRM (CCS, 5C, HDCP, AACS, broadcast flags, 960x540 output), connectors (component, DVI, then HDMI, then 1.2, now 1.3!), etc. They're all laden with a desire and concommitant expectation to hook their audience and follow-on manufacturers, so they'll pay the patent-holders royalties.
What they don't reasonably appreciate is that all this (mostly-unwanted and unnecessary) complication carries a natural aversion from most practitioners and consumers. Even professionals are often non-plussed when facing these daunting installation and setup tasks. Consumers don't know what to specify, and installers are often taking a flyer if they're not copying a combination of components someone else, e.g., a reviewer reading press releases (see above) tells them via some high-clay-content publication.
The customer ends up paying and often being unhappy with the price-performance ratio.
Bandwidth availability to download 20GB+ movies in a reasonable or convenient amount of time is not really feasible for most people, at least compared to the convenience and limited expense of reasonably-priced optical media, as DVD-Rs are presently. The recent Comcast "unlimited Internet bandwidth" sales versus feeling the need to constrain BitTorrent-type users highlights part of the problem.
From my limited experience, however, hard disk media appears to be the presently preferred media for users who are backing up their purchased video and audio within the home. Sliding DVDs in and out for every 5% change in information accessed (i.e., 4.7GB vs 950GB) just doesn't cut it by comparison.
It's going to be very interesting to see the price point at which removable Terabyte platters are going to be sold. If one can get a TB hard drive for $300, I'd say such TB optical RW drives ought to come initially in at $400 and $20 for the media, making them 4x the cost of DVD-R present DVD media. After a year, they should probably come down to $200 for such a drive and $5 for the media, at parity with current blank disks, as $/GB.
What I think would be hot would be shipping protected-against-erase non-DRM movies at 1080p/@24fps with 5.1 audio as 24-bit 96kHz with the remaining portion of the TB drive as -R or even -RW media. That would mean they could balance their expenses against the consumer cost of two products simultaneously--in both of which they'll almost surely be interested, that is, movie and personal storage space. Almost everyone would love to back up their entire audio collection onto the remaining 900GB of a future 1st-run movie. Studios could see copies sold at retail for $34.99, no sweat.
Just today I was going to buy an HD-DVD player, hoping to find one of those under-$100 Wal-Mart jobbies, which I wanted to be sure would do 1080p. It was a daunting exercise for me, though I'm the a heavy-duty industry junkie, trained an ISF/CEDIA installer and knew what I wanted. I could easily imagine others would make a mistake and order the wrong model or be unhappy several months after making such a purchase. You can be darned sure I would be unhappy if not livid, should such a player begin playing anything back at 960x540 onto my cool, Sharp 1080p LCD!
I then looked at Blu-Ray players, and had to imbibe all this talk of incompatibilities of the current 1.0 machines versus two coming levels, 1.1 and 2.0 which will be required to do this or that. It makes me angry to consider the $800 player is so incompatible with the future. That, plus it's been at the shop because it stutters horribly in certain playback situations. I would have to guess they all do if they're the same type, but who knows? The Geek Squad has been paid to figure it out. They darn well better, but if I can get a new machine out of it, I know I don't want my old, out-dated, stuttering 1.0 that's doomed to have more incompatibilties in just a few more months!
HDTVDave rumors that Fox and Warner were each paid half a billion bucks just to come over to their camp exclusively. Just who are we supposed to believe is going to pay that bill if they're ever going to get Blu-Ray into the black. All their customers, that's who. Well, count me out, hurling an epithet of a pox on both their houses!
Netflix, woo-hoo, though I have a local favorite video store that lets me rent anything for $1/rental, three days for each, if I pay in a $100 pre-paid block, in advance.
HF
Bravo.
Bra-effing-vo, sir.
HDTV could have been a relatively smooth transition, but the media and tech companies went and screwed it up. Why are there three different “standards” for HDTV—720p, 1080i, and 1080p? Is 1080i really better than 720p? Do I need component or HDMI cables? What about sound quality?
The term clusterf*ck was coined to describe this specific situation.
Wow, I’m surprised first, to even see this thread on FR, and, second, to see this many HD gearheads on here!
I was a HDDVD early adopter in summer 2006 and purchased the very first player that was released. Although firmware updates were necessary, my player today plays all the newest HDDVD discs just fine.
The Sony/BluRay apologists’ statements previously referenced in this thread I find particularly infuriating. I mean, BR/Sony was “forced” to release their unfinished format because HDDVD released their completed standard format? WTH?
Nobody forced them to release early! They got beat to the market and should have finished their product, then released it. That is piss poor if you ask me.
This debacle, along with Sony’s constant attempts to dominate technology markets with proprietary technology such as the stupid Memory Stick for digital cameras aggravates me. Why can’t they just use SD or CF memory cards like everone else?
And, like a few of the posters in this thread, just because everyone is saying it’s over and BR won the war, I will not be purchasing a BR player for at least a year, maybe two. I made my choice of the best format at the time and I am not in a financial position to lay out money for another HD format that is not even finalized yet.
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