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[keasy]

Time Warner have defected on their dual backing of both HD content formats and dropped HD DVD in favour of Poo BluRay.

This is bad news indeed.

The North american HD DVD promotion consortium/group still includes major major technoligical players such as Intel and Microsoft.
But to lose Warner really is a major blow as the deciding factor in the format war will predictably be ultimately shaped by the movie viewer above the data storage platform user.
That only really leaves Paramount as a major movie producer and distributor behind HD DVD where as Poo BluRay has major single format supporting Sony Corp and Time Warner.
This is bad news indeed for folks like me who are hoping for the in my opinion superior HD DVD format to survive and thrive enough to establish itself as mainstream if not the format of HD choice.
I can't help feel an impending doom for HD DVD to be relegated to the technophile's playroom whilst the average Joe ludite believes he has the bestest and latest in his BluRay.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080106.whdtv0106/BNStory/Technology
http://uk.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUKN0633094620080107

[Wooster]

They're both doomed anyway, it's just a question of bandwidth. 

[keasy]

Well I don't know how you can say they are both doomed, one is going to thrive as the standard movie media. And HD TV's are selling in the bucket loads.

[Wooster]

One day we will look at the disks and laugh that we ever stored media in such a crude fashion.

Once we get our network sorted out then it'll be more cost effective to just download or stream the movies, France offers consumers speeds of 44Meg and Japan is over 90Meg.
At that speed it's a 1hr download for a 40GB Hi Def movie... going to the shop and buying it could take longer.
Then you don't have to worry about the format either, media centres to plug into the TV are cheap as chips and you have the choice of streaming it to the device or transferring it to the storage device in the unit itself.
And any odd movies you want to keep you just dump onto your increasingly cheap external hard drive (1.5TB external drives are only £150 atm and falling rapidly)

Of course the price would have to be right for downloading but I did a quick check and in The Sates '3:10 to Yuma' is only $3 to download, that's pretty reasonable imho.

[corroded]

tbh, i dont see disks being fully replaced... flash drives are already replacing optical... but solid state drives won't replace the old hard drive... for fast access, sure... where amount of data isn't necessarily huge... but for storage... the old spinning platter is gonna be around for a long time methinks. [pedantic technicality there, but i do get your underlying point that optical storage is doomed]

on hd... its probably the end for hddvd, which is what i would preferred to win. my housemate is a sony fan. tv, dvd player, ps2 (wants a ps3), and camera. convinced that bravias are the best, best quality... best image processors (don't have the heart to tell him they really aren't)...

hell, he argued that drm wasn't a bad thing and it only affects pirates... where i promptly informed him it actually only affects the people who actually buy the stuff, and knocks the prices up as they waste money on stuff thats broken in seconds. and the pirates have a version that works on anything they want.

then i told him his tv wouldn't support the hdmi 1.3 and might default down to compatibility mode if he bought a ps3, and the fun and games of hdcp.

oddly, he wasn't very pleased.

but then, i did have to explain the difference between piracy and stealing to him and his girlfriend.

'wouldn't you be pissed off if someone stole your car?'
'of course i would'
'that's the same as piracy'
'no its not, if someone came along and made an exact duplicate of my car and left mine that's piracy'

hdcp, and the protections of these formats thats whats putting me off... i technically have hdcp capable monitor and graphics card... if i got a drive, it would work... i have no inclination of willingly buying into more drm, specially since they have the ability to revoke players if they get compromised, rendering my kit obsolete.

they can fuck right off, fuck right off and die in a big fucking fire.

[Stevie]

Optical disks as a storage media will be around for a while yet, and as a new PS3 owner i'm on the side of blu ray, purely for the fact that i want some life out of my console.

All about capacity innit and blu ray blows HD DVD out the water in those stakes. Anything else is a moot point as far as i'm concerned.

As for piracy, we'll see how long it takes to circumvent.

[corroded]

It's already been broken, a few times in fact.

One of the releases was cracked before the first retail disk came out supporting it.

Capacity, actually is something of a moot point. You can get a 1080i WMV in under 5gb, at same quality as a full res HDDVD/Blueray disk.... what's the point? Really think they should have just focused on improved compression algorithms actually... but HDDVD gives ample room for High Def, Blueray is actually excessive tbh.

[Stevie]

Not just about movies though is it? People use optical disks for data storage.

[keasy]

HD DVD algos reproduce finer detail than BluRay so it's not only about capacity.

Bandwidth costs money too, just because it's available doesn't mean it will be the consumers popular choice.
William Gates has been trying to introduce such schemes into the living room for years and failed, it's still to technological and expensive for the services and equipment for the avg punter who has only just learned to use a DVD player and managed to afford one now they are cheap.
The death of the disc as the main movie media is years away, hence all the money being thrown into them.

[corroded]

Not just about movies though is it? People use optical disks for data storage.

True, however thats not necessarily a reason as to why blueray has to prevail. There has been many PC only formats for high capacity data storage, and still are many that pee all over blueray and hddvd.

I seriously thing the days are numbered for broadcast TV being seen as the medium it is now, and being totally superseded by on demand services. I figure, there might still be schedules of when things are released and you can access them in that order (emulating a scheduled TV approach), but ondemand services will eventually become the norm... course, all based on increasing bandwidth, compressions and uptake of computers in living rooms (old parallel exists techies buy, public follows eventually...a). I think alot of the models that exist today are going to be dramatically redesigned, in fact we are starting to see it with the music industry already... EMI dropping DRM on iTunes, Sony (?!?!:?!?!!!WTF?) dropping DRM... Amazon open DRM free music service... tis only the matter of time before DRM gets dropped from media

My ludite parents recently bought a DVD player with Hard Drive for recording TV, most of the techies i know have ways to connect up their PCs to act as PVRs, most own TVs, but rarely watch anything that's on them rather download the episode and watch at their leisure.

[nnex]

i vote HD-DVD..blu ray sux ass...Warner also,,,,