Posted on 03/18/2005 10:37:26 PM PST by Swordmaker
Analysis: Behind Apple's Blu-Ray Move
Apple did more than just affiliate with a trade group looking to develop and promote a new technology when it announced plans last week to join the Blu-Ray Disc Association’s board of directors. The company also inserted itself right into the middle of a battle over high-definition DVD.
The Battleground
Unless you’re on the bleeding edge of home video, you may not realize that HDTV has higher resolution than DVD. HDTV’s two main resolutions are the progressive 720P format (1,280-by-720 without interlacing) and 1080i (1,920-by-1,080 with interlacing). A widescreen DVD uses 852-by-480 resolution. Satellite and cable companies are already compressing these images and lowering resolutions to fit more of them in a stream, but if you can view a movie in HDTV from an antenna (that is, over the air), you may be surprised to see a significantly better picture than even a “special edition” DVD of the same title.
Apple has already bought into the HD revolution, with even the entry-level iMovie now supporting HD video in iLife ’05, even though the least expensive camcorder you can get to make the stuff costs about $3,500.
All this HD video content needs a better storage method than the now decade-old DVD. Today’s single-layer 4.7GB DVD discs can hold nearly two hours of MPEG-2 compressed video, but the same disc would hold less than 20 minutes of HD video. Even using dual-layer discs, no one really wants a Lord of the Rings: Return of the King HD special edition that requires 13 DVDs just for the feature. More capacity is required.
Blu-Ray Versus HD-DVD
That, of course, started horrible war. The Blu-Ray Disc Association (BDA) promotes a new high-capacity standard based on a blue laser, compared to the red laser used to read today’s optical medial. Blu-Ray discs, known by the BD abbreviation (as in BD-ROM and BD-Video), pack up to 25GB on a single layer, and 50GB on dual-layer discs, in the same form factor as the familiar CD and DVD. That’s enough for two hours of HD video on a single-layer disc. Blu-Ray has an impressive list of backers that includes Sony, Disney, Dell, HP, Hitachi, LG Electronics (Goldstar), Matsushita (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, TDK, Thomson, Vivendi Universal (games), and Electronic Arts.
The important names missing from that list are Toshiba, NEC, Viacom, NBC Universal, and Time Warner. They back the competing HD-DVD format that’s also based on a blue laser, but uses similar manufacturing techniques to DVD. The resulting discs are supposed to be less expensive, but they definitely hold less—15GB per layer instead of Blu-Ray’s 25GB per layer.
Although each format’s players will be backward compatible with today’s DVD discs, no player is expected to read both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs, nor are content providers expected to produce discs in both formats.
That draws the battle line—whichever format does the most for consumers will probably win. Sony invented Blu-Ray and supports it not only in electronics but through Sony Pictures, Sony Television, and other properties it owns (including Columbia, Tri-Star, and now MGM Studios). Dell, HP, and now Apple have all thrown their support behind Blu-Ray, and you’ll be able to buy drives not only from Sony but also from a variety of other manufacturers listed above.
HD-DVD has only Toshiba and NEC on its hardware side at present, but it has already received commitments from Paramount (presumably including other Viacom properties like CBS, MTV, and Nickelodeon), NBC Universal, and Time Warner (presumably including not only Warner Bros. but also any titles from cable properties like CNN, TNT, or Cartoon Network). Fox has joined the governing bodies of both competing standards, but joined Blu-Ray most recently and is presumed to prefer Blu-Ray at this point.
In short, many more companies are behind Blu-Ray, but three of the biggest movie and television production companies (Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros.) have committed to HD-DVD.
Apple’s Role
According to CNet News, Apple’s commitment to Blu-Ray means the company will “participate in the promotion and marketing” of the format, and the BDA hopes to “tap [Apple’s] marketing and creative genius” as well.
In all likelihood, Apple’s commitment also means that Apple will eventually replace SuperDrives with Blu-Ray drives, that Mac OS X (news - web sites)’s optical media support will include Blu-Ray but not HD-DVD, and that programs from DVD Studio Pro to iDVD may work with Blu-Ray but won’t work with HD-DVD—you’ll need third-party hardware and software for that.
The market will pick one of these two HD formats over the next few years, but Apple’s push for HD on the desktop can’t wait until Adam Smith’s invisible hand points to one kind of disc. At this point, Blu-Ray certainly seems like the safer choice—it’s going to work with more computers and consumer players than HD-DVD, and may well win the battle.
Until it does, though, it’s going to be tense on the video frontier.
BLu-Ray High Definition Standard and Apple's strategic move PING!
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Hell, I'm still trying to figure out why I can't just rip one DVD to another.
Unless you can store 80GB on a flash card, that ain't going to happen.
The article leaves out a few things:
1080p is in the HDTV spec as well, but TVs supporting that resolution are only starting to come out. In a few years, that's going to be the ideal resolution.
Microsoft has announced HD-DVD support, presumably because of its Xbox2 (though the rumor is they'll use dual-layer DVDs for that, as HD-DVD drives are still too expensive.)
Philips (who else?) is supposedly working on a drive that reads both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. It's just a rumor, though.
HD-DVD's advantage isn't the companies backing it, but the three letters D, V, and D.
Unless I am misunderstanding what you are saying...
I use Nero on a Windows XP Pro box to smoke my DVDs to copy media that I actually play. It's a fairly slow burn, but it works well. BTW, you'll need several gigs of free disk space to do it.
My IMAC doesn't have DVD burning capabilities, so if that is your issue, I am unable to suggest anything.
There are definite (current) cost advantages to optical storage media. The chip designs are always addressing the capacity issue.
Yeah, but a 200GB flash memory card is a long way off, and optical media reading speeds have improved tremendously since the days of the 4x CD-ROM.
A battery that lasts twenty days is also a long way off. The advances in memory chip density will come faster.
They will, but not fast enough to pre-empt Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD.
I dunno, who would have ever thought that we would have 300 Gb Hard disks that we could hold in our hands? I can remember when it took 2 people to carry a 10 Mb disk drive. I know, I'm old.
Oh, I'm not doubting it'll happen. It just won't happen in time to supplant Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD.
And doesn't flash memory have a limited number of read-write cycles? Not very useful for long-term storage and usage.
:'D Same boat. Chips for the good old Apple IIe were actually chips, 8 to get the rating (1/8th of 64K wasn't 8K, as far as the chips were concerned); the Apple DOS 3.3 storage limit is 400K (not 143K as has often been stated), which meant those 10 meg drives from Trustor and Sider and Quark (now a software company) were divided into 255 400K volumes, a bit unwieldy. ProDOS has a volume size limit of 32MB, which is, hmm, about one-fourth of what my digital camera has installed. ;'), and that was plenty roomy. (':
Apple's marketing genius has moved the company from a 20 percent marketing share to a two percent share. The share has actually dropped since they started selling decent hardware and OSX.
That's marketing.
Long-term offline storage? It'll lay there in the protective envelope a long while. Long-term usage? Here's a page...
http://www.bitmicro.com/press_resources_flash_ssd.php
"Unlike DRAM, flash memory chips have a limited lifespan. Further, different flash chips have a different number of write cycles before errors start to occur. Flash chips with 300,000 write cycles are common, and currently the best flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block (with 8,000 blocks per chip). Now, just because a flash chip has a given write cycle rating, it doesn't mean that the chip will self-destruct as soon as that threshold is reached. It means that a flash chip with a 1 million Erase/Write endurance threshold limit will have only 0.02 percent of the sample population turn into a bad block when the write threshold is reached for that block... With usage patterns of writing gigabytes per day, each flash-based SSD should last hundreds of years, depending on capacity. If it has a DRAM cache, it'll last even longer."
I'd say that compares more than favorably with the CDRW format. For offline storage and archiving, we should use optical, mainly because there aren't enough cliff-faces on Earth to hold the information we all store, and we'd wear out our hammers and chisels (and spend our lives) trying to record it all.
The nice thing about format wars is, if one keeps in mind that all victories are pyrrhic, one can wait just a little while and save money, if one shops carefully. Zip disks were a handy format, but lost their appeal with faster, larger, cheaper hard drives and then along came CD burners. Zip is still available -- Iomega's other forays into similar but not quite compatible media formats haven't been resounding successes, mainly because the cost of media never came down enough.
DVDs are cheaper to make than CDs -- unless the higher price per MB for commercial titles on CD vs DVD is just a sign that there's way too much financial burden from cocaine in the music industry. ;') An album recorded 20 years ago and available on CD is often more money than a DVD version of a movie from three years ago.
Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD:
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119665,00.asp
Whoever worked procurement for those guys should've forked out the extra cash for the optional wheels. ;-)
Love the tagline!
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