Blue-Ray or HD-DVD - Page 3
Forum Storage : Optical Media - Blue-Ray or HD-DVD
First let me preface this: My reply will sound argumentative, but I am just going for a discussion, I swear! 
1) There have been over 7.5M 360's sold which includes both core and premium models, therefore there are potentially 7.5M HD-DVD players for an incremental cost of $200 (or less if you go online), not too shabby. If you go the full cost route, it's a minimum investment of $500 ($299 core + $200 add on) and a maximum investment of $600 ($399 + $200).
2) The 360 is actually available. I don't disagree I haven't seen much in the way of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD stand alone players in stores, but you are virtually guaranteed to get a 360 if you want into any store. If not, there will be somewhere in your neighborhood. PS3's you can't find, period.
3) I have been unable to really locate either HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray discs, so that doesn't bode well for either, but such stuff is expected given the infancy of both technologies.
4) I totally agree that the PS3 is going to sell as a cheap Blu-Ray player for a while, lets face it a $600 gaming console that plays Blu-Ray or a $800 stand alone unit? Let's not deal with the gaming capacity discussion because it isn't pertinent to the Format War (just heading it off so someone doesn't hijack the thread).
5) Customers are much more willing to look on line and buy stuff from e-tailers this time around as opposed to the previous Format wars, so confining people to brick and mortar stores, while a very good point for many customers, is a diminishing limitation on products.
6) I think that if a customer had a choice between a PS3 and buying a 360 + the HD drive, they would be hesitant, just because it doesn't come integrated in the 360. However, Availability is a big issue, is there even going to be another shipment of PS3's before Christmas? I honestly don't have the answer to that, but just something to think about.
In all honesty, I don't think either camp has done a great job of marketing. In fact, I would go as far to say as they have done a very poor job. I was in Best Buy looking for a 1080p television (just because I still have yet to purchase a HD set.... damn college kids and no money 
) and not one sales person even mentioned matching it with a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player. I think part of the blame can be placed on retailers not educating their people, but most of the blame should be put on the respective camps.
Poor advertisement will kill anything
Anyways i made a couple posts and they seem to be gone now and i even had to search for this thread to even get it to come up again since the email links kept telling me the thread i was looking for doesnt exsist anymore 
As far as your console comparasine its a great one btw. The sales of those consoles will determin what people will buy movie wise later (for those of whome that buy consoles.)
the ps3 could in fact hurt blue ray considerably since its pretty much not available.
Anyways since my posts are gone ill have to try and remember what i even posted and return.
| Quote : Anyways i made a couple posts and they seem to be gone now and i even had to search for this thread to even get it to come up again since the email links kept telling me the thread i was looking for doesnt exsist anymore |
yeah I can't figure out what the hell happened, nor do I know what I said. I remember making 2 points about hardware manufacturers tending towards HD-DVD and movie studios tending towards Blu-Ray, but I forgot what my analysis was lol. Strange things have been happening lately ... its the government! Run ET Run!
| Quote : nah. Just means your encoded disks give you an electronic "up yours buddy" when you try to play them. |
Yeah, that is how I understand it as well. It goes back to the "handshake" idea inherent in Blu-Ray (and possibly HD-DVD too, I honestly don't remember everything about their DRM). The BR player (just as an example) will send a message through the HDMI input asking "Do you understand HDCP?" to which the TV will reply either "Yes" or "No." If the answer is yes, all is well and your BR disc goes as planned (hopefully). If the answer is no, then an image of the Sony CEO pops up with his middle finger in the air and the title reads "Buy our new TV or burn!" Ok, not really but you get the idea.
Honestly, it sounds like a real piss poor way to do DRM. Integrating it into our TV sets and cables? wtf? Let me watch the damn disc on whatever damn tv whenever I damn well please (just my 2 cents about DRM there ). I don't disagree that there should be some form of encryption scheme to deter piracy, mainly because you can never prevent it, but making it harder to crack is fine. The problem comes when you impede a legitimate users use of the disc. If there is no way for me to back up a disc (I reburn DVDs if the DVD starts getting scratched) then I am very unlikely to buy the disc. To be honest, I don't care about their capacity for archival needs because I just toss my crap on a RAID 1 setup (soon to be moved to a NAS ) errr used to, I am working on restoring that but I need money for HDD's. These camps need to compare their loss due to piracy against their loss due to overly restrictive DRM.
Side note: I am not happy about repurchasing 300+ discs in a new format... I really expect my purchases to be prospective and not repurchases.
This reminds me of every other format war and i just realised something. The better of the two techs always loses for one insignificant reason. that i have no idea what is but others might.
vhs - beta max
zip drive - ls120
omg mini disks?
and so on
I loved my mini disk drive i still preffer it over cd in everyway.
just take the zip vs ls120 the ls120 was a far better product in everyway. more capacity, faster, 100% backwords compatable, turns 1.44 floppys into 30meg disks and so forth. the only reason i still even have a floppy drive is because of the ls120 drive
anyways i noticed something else also. by the time one of the standards win a new tech is already pusing to market to replace the old techs.
In general I would agree with that. The one format that didn't have a war was DVD (excluding the ridiculous +/- R debate). Think about it. DVD's started coming on the scene in 1999-2000 and nobody questioned them. At first, as always, people were hesitant to buy them because of their extensive VHS collection, but after 2-3 years the DVD market exploded. Now we have TV shows on box sets (FINALLY FULL ACCESS W/O COMMERCIALS!!!!! ). People took one look and said "oh goodness, VHS quality sucks." Ahhh that good old days of no format war lol.
Not to mention the only other optical movie format was laser disk record sized player or cd sized player. DVD didnt really have any compatition.
I've always wondered why the better of the two always seems to lose in a format war as well, Enforcer22. My only guess is that it is better because more work was put into it, and more work means it costs more than the alternative. Since America is a land of money-misers (generalizing here) they will support the crappier product simply because it's cheaper in the short run. Everyone knows that prices come down after the factories churn out enough product (I'm looking at consoles here) but we don't want to pay the premium for the first year or so that it takes to get to that lower price point.
It would be nice if they could just throw a third layer on DVDs to get around 14 Gigs per disc. I know it might not help much in the hi-def war because they would probably keep the film on one layer and have other stuff on the other layers, but it would hopefully be backwards compatible with other DVD players. And it would be better to archive all my stuffs.
Whaaa? There was a competitor to the unholy Zip Drive? I remember it coming out and I was thinking it was so cool because floppies could hold 100 or 250 MB, but then I learned that they were not backwards compatible, AND you needed a Zip-100 and a Zip-250 drive if you wanted to use both formats. Needless to say I didn't buy that load of crap even though I don't remember hearing about the ls120.
i actualy used it on my 386 and could copy my whole hard drive onto it with 20megs to spare was vary usefull. Also uneeded for documents it could carry alot more info then that 
the ls240 was also backwords compatable with all floppys including the ls120 media. that hole war was pretty short only about 3 years and zip came out on top for whatever reason i dont know.
Hmmm, I don't even remember the LS240. I must have missed that (obviously). 3 years is pretty short for a format war, on average I think they last 5-6 years (my own guess 
)
Iomega is a pretty much useless company now a days.... I mean honestly, when was the last time you bought something from them or heard of a new product worth while from them? Just my 2 cents.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/12/06/ [...] scussions/
Just thought I would throw that out there for yall to chew on
Ok. I can get behind some of that, but never underestimate the power of grandchildren. All i would have to say to my grandmother is "HD-DVD is better" and I doubt if she would question me. She knows I know what is going on more than she does, and she trusts me. This is obviously not the case for everyone, but yet another facet to consider given your scenario mentioned.
You are right that if you go the full cost route a stand alone HD-DVD player costs the same as a 360+HD-DVD drive, which is why we generally talk about past sales and HD camp's ability to turn those into HD-DVD players. If someone wants a HD-DVD player, there is no reason to buy a 360 + HD drive if they just want to watch movies. That would be stupid.
I do have one objection specifically. First, let me preface it by saying I honestly don't know how it works in the majority of grandparents homes, however, in my experience the grandparents don't want a game console in the house. My grandparents barely let us turn on the TV while we were there. It wasn't because they are troglodytes of any sort, but because it was their mission to make sure we were well rounded. As a result, we always played social games like poker, skip-bo, and had to play outside and fish. So while I do see your point, I don't necessarily agree that is the majority view of grandparents.
Also, I don't know where you live (obviously), but here in a rather small town, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs are available in the same quantities. I think it has more to do with store preference (possibly). PS3's are in short supply... they are impossible to find . I'd be willing to bet that HD-DVD's and Blu-Ray are available in the same quantities if you pick the right store. I wouldn't expect much in Wal-Mart any time soon, or many other mass market low cost stores. Expect them to stay in the upper echelon store types for awhile. I realize Best Buy and Circuit City aren't "high end" per say, but they are clearly above Wal-Mart, Target, and other such value stores.
I promise I am just really good at playing devil's advocate and I am not starting a camp war.
http://news.digitaltrends.com/talkback158.html
Another interesting article I found. It seems as I am not the only one calling HD-DVD the victor. I realize there is still much that could go wrong and that could change, but there is alot going for HD-DVD over Blu-Ray. Also note, that the author believes Blu-Ray could stick around as a high-density storage medium.... I think I've heard that somewhere before
Also, I found the comment about Sony replacing the PS's CEO quite amusing. $1.5B loss.... not good if you're Sony... or anyone for that matter.
Not sure where you got his pro american thing ( wasnt aware that was even bad ) dont even see the pro ms thing (not sure thats bad either) but i think he was talking about consoles telling who would win and indeed xbox is in alot more homes with a cheap available hd dvd player. Though i find this artical somewhat flawed. Peronsaly i dont see why they didnt just put the hd dvd player in the console i mean looking at the prices of those things this round the extra price wouldnt make consoles look anymore un atractive then they normaly look.
bad i need to edit i clicked the wrong link that was more or less a responce to the post before you XD. now ill read your link.
Now i know why the toms comment didnt make sense lol.
OK i read it i just dont see the pro american or pro ms thing (not that i can find that being a wrong thing.
I did notice one thing
BetaMax, Mini-Disk, MemoryStick, and now Blu-ray.
sony seems to always kill the better standards of all things. though consoles are a big market as far as im concnerned its a way of selling units of the players and sets the ground but the war isnt faught in the console.
Rob seems overly opinionated sometimes, like he's right and everyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. Other times he puts out pretty decent predictions, but I think this one is a little off the mark.
| Quote : HD-DVD wins because of the Xbox 360... |
Hardly. It will be a nice boost, but the HD-DVD addon is just as new as the PS3s. And his ominous predictions that Blu-Ray may be the death of the PS3 seems simply wrong. There was a link to another article (I can't find it now for the life of me! 
) where I believe Rob is complaining about the PS3 and Blu-Ray again - basically saying that they have done such a poor job that there may never be a PS4 because of this. Sony is too big of a company to simply die because of one console that isn't up to par with the rest of the market. Heck, it's survived even with the death of the Betamax and the rest of their debacles. Anyway, I'll look around more for that link, I don't want to be misquoting him or anything.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/12/07/dvd_terabyte/
A terabyte of data on a regular DVD? Now this stuff is interesting to me. If they can increase the capacity of regular DVDs, I'm all in. I don't want to invest hundreds of dollars for slightly superior viewing technology. I only hope that if this comes about it will be a viable solution to keep up with the market.
| Quote : Granted, yes they had some hardships this year, but they certainly had some wins too. The cell processor alone is something of an achievement. They listed a history of failures for a HUGE electronics company, but failed to list their history of wins too. PS2 anyone? |
I agree, he did leave off the successes. PS2 was a great console, I hate Sony, but PS2 was great, but not perfect. Sony really missed the boat with online gaming and overall functionality outside pure gaming. However, PS3, while a technical marvel in a way, has been delayed so many times, run way over budget, half asses online game play, and has a PSU more than double the size of the 360. If you read the my post prior to your's, specificaly the artcle, you will see that that PS division alone is projecting a 1.5B loss. Well everyone expects intial losses on console launches due to Kaizen efficencies in production which drive down cost and they eventually break even on sales price and then derive revenue from other lines of business(i.e. M$'s Xbox Live, iPod drives iTunes sales, etc.).
| Quote : Aside from that, Blu-Ray is superior to HD DVD in format. I can't read all the tech sheets in detail like perhaps our poster might, but I know that a disk that can hold more and compete in reading times sounds like a winner to me. |
Strictly speaking to the spec sheet, Blu-Ray win, again I agree. The capacity is superior and so is the transfer rate (by a mediocre margin if I remember correcty, in speed that is). However, the sheer cost of shifting production to Blu-Ray is mutiple times more expensive than shifting to HD-DVD. Also, the DRM scheme embedded in Blu-Ray promises to be the most restrictive and overly aggressive the market has ever seen. Supposidely (this is where I recall stuff i read more than a year ago, so take it with a grain of salt ), if the ACS encyption is broken on drive the drives serial number is added to a "black list," much like if you try and use a hacked Xbox on Xbox live (the EEPROM chip ID is banned from Live), then the player is rendered obsolete and you can't ever use it again. I really need to go refresh my memory on that in order to make sure I am correct.
| Quote : The PS3 has yet to begin really selling, as many simply can't afford it yet, or are waiting for availabilty and to see how it does. I don't think there are very many "fanboys" of consoles so much as titles. Titles sell products, and products that become mainstream get better titles. |
I totally agree. Franchise games like Final Fantasy, Halo, Mario Bro's, sell consoles more than the hardware itself. There is an aspect of hardware appeal, but it is like computers: Why would you buy a 8800GTX if you didn't intend to play a really good game? That same chesnut.
| Quote : Sony can still win the DVD format war, as they've only just begun to fight with their new console. I think Rob Enderle, author of the above linked article needs to step back and perhaps retract his obviously pro-American or Pro-M$ article. This isn't the kind of crap I like to see from THG. Leave speculation to the opinions section. |
I tend to agree with you that the article should probably have been posted in the opinions section. With that said, I think he draws rather reasonable conclusions. Sony has been plagued by problems with the PS3, Blu-Ray players are still 20-30% more than a HD-DVD player (the ones you can actually buy) and each Blu-Ray movie is $5 more than HD-DVD, not in every case but on average again. There is a hint of Pro-M$ in the article, but you have to admit M$ executed the 360 with darn near perfect precision. There have been reletively few problems, overall, and it was on-time (as far as I know Nov of 05 was thier originally intended launch date).
| Quote : There was a link to another article (I can't find it now for the life of me! |
Sony is in trouble, but they aren't any going concern problems.... yet. The Battery fiasco has been detrimental. The financial impact just for replacing the batteries is now somewhere around the $300M mark, if not slightly above then add that to the projected loss of the PS division of 1.5B and you begin to see it has issues to work out. Do I think they will go out of business.....na, they just need to pull a GM and completely overhaul their operations and their mentality for doing things. Sony has the same mindset as GM has had over the past 15-20 years.... push demand. Push demand isn't a good long term strategy, as the Big 3 automakers will attest to.
Also i forgot to mention sony didnt make the cell processor thats IBM. IBM also made the cpu for the xbox and most likely the nintendo. So seems IBM is the only true winner here
Touche.... I totaly forgot about that. It also has made programmers lives hell. I remember reading a few articles about programmers complaining about the sheer complexity of the processor. While powerful, it is overly complex. The 360 has 3 full cores (why 3 though? we have dual and quad core in computers lol) and the Cell has a main core with 7 subordinate mini cores (if I remember the architecture corretly).
IBM always gets no glory from things like this..... just a sh!t ton of cash
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