Has Blu-Ray won the battle?

Post by **jholmesh** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 5:42 pm

Many of us are in the process or eventually will be upgrading to a high-definition workflow.

The recent news of most of the Hollywood Studios "defecting" from exclusivity with Toshiba and their HD-DVD format to also producing in Sony's Blu-Ray format, coupled with the fact that Toshiba has yet to release an internal HD-DVD drive for workstations (promised over a year ago); Does this signal that the scale has tipped toward Blu-Ray?

Opinions?

Thanks,

Jon

Post by **Patrick** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 6:00 pm

I noticed in my city's JB Hi-Fi store, some Blu-Ray titles on the shelves in addition to the regular dvds. Though not a single HD DVD in sight. That may be another sign of the increasing popularity of Blu-Ray.

What I find interesting is that when reading online reviews of movies released in both HD disc formats, I get the general impression that the HD DVDs are more consistent in quality. Some reviews seem to suggest that there are a number of Blu-Ray titles out there whose quality is not much better than regular dvds. Though one exception to this is House of Flying Daggers which is supposedly a very impressive looking Blu-ray title.

http://members.cox.net/home-theater/ · Post by **JCook** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 6:26 pm

As you probably heard Warner announced to go BRay only but not until May. From what I've read many large retail chains are now pushing Paramount and Universal to at least go neutral. Our local Best Buty has 5 display shelves vs three in favor of BRay.

Paramount, which went HDDVD only earlier this year apparantly does have an out clause to go neutral supporting both camps. Both Paramount and Universal have publicly stated that they're not dropping HDDVD support however both have not said that they will not support BRay. Paramount is expected to make an announcement soon with regards to restarting BRay support.

Right now, I'd say the momentum has shifted, but it did so recently the other direction when Paramount went HDDVD only. Therefore to answer your question I'd say No the war is still on. Yeah I know a rather pragmatic answer, however if Paramount announces within 30-60 days their intention to go neutral then I'd say it's game over and the dominos will fall rapidly.

A good resource for insider information can be found over on Bill Hunt's site http://www.thedigitalbits.com

Bill's site championed DVD over DIVX as well as support for original aspect ratio releases and anamorphic support back in the early days of DVD. The digital bits publicly announced their support of BRay quite some time ago....

Post by **superotto.40** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 6:52 pm

here in Italy at the moment i have seen only BRay's on the video stores.. :roll:

Post by **Nigel** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 9:20 pm

Both have failed since the day is coming where all media in your home will live on a hard drive or in the cloud.

Good Luck

Post by **jholmesh** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 11:01 pm

On eBay, it looks like a lot of people are "voting" as well.

Looks like panic selling of HD-DVD players with very low prices.

Post by **jholmesh** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 11:10 pm

By Patrick, above, regarding supposed higher quality of HD-DVD over Blu-Ray.

"Though one exception to this is House of Flying Daggers which is supposedly a very impressive looking Blu-ray title."

I've seen some regular DVD titles that were awesome, and some that were of poorer visual quality.

It all has to do with the quality of the production and post-production work, and encoding. IMHO, the format of the disc, whether in SD or HD, is not the ultimate predicter of visual quality.

Post by **Will2** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 11:30 pm

My wife worked for Blockbuster's headquarters and they saw that coming a mile away. Blu-Ray was outselling HD-DVD by a wide margin in their stores. They believed it was mostly due to the Sony Playstation.

Post by **marc** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 12:10 am

those RCA laser discs that were popular back in the early 80's were really nice. Those things were awesome! Even when you transfered from the disc to a video tape you could see the superior results!

Post by **Patrick** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 2:56 am

Jholmesh: "By Patrick, above, regarding supposed higher quality of HD-DVD over Blu-Ray."

I never stated that HD DVDs are necessarily better quality than Blu-Ray discs. It's just that online reviews seem to indicate that the quality is more consistent with HD DVD titles (that's when I was reading such reviews close to a year ago.)

"It all has to do with the quality of the production and post-production work, and encoding. IMHO, the format of the disc, whether in SD or HD, is not the ultimate predicter of visual quality."

Exactly. Well more to the point, assuming the production and post production are done to a high quality standard, then it really depends on how good a job they do with the encoding that determines the quality of the DVD, Blu-Ray disc or HD DVD.

Yes, as noted, we have all seen great looking DVDs and also some DVDs that don't look much better than vhs quality. The same applies with HD DVDs and Blu-Ray discs - some titles will look like true High Definition quality. Whereas some supposedly look more like regular DVDs, And from the reviews Ive read, it seems that this inconsistency in quality is more common with Blu-Ray titles.

I'm wondering if it's because of the competition (HD DVD) that the Blu-Ray camp are being pressured to hastily release titles out on to the market so the quality with some titles may not be as good as it could be with a rushed job....perhaps.

Post by **Angus** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 9:11 pm

The porn industry has just announced this weekend that it is backing Blu-Ray.....should secure a format victory for Sony.

Blu-Ray is the superior format, and the market has changed from the early 80's whe Betamax lost to the inferior VHS largely due to price. Today everyone has a recorder of some kind and is looking for the best HD reproducer...and that is Blu-Ray.

Nigel is just wrong. People don't want to store movies on hard discs. They want something they can take with them, play in the bedroom (most people don't care a damn for streaming movies within their home)...something they can take to a friend's house....and something that sits in a cupboard in a nice shiny case with pretty pictures on it.

Post by **escubria** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 9:17 pm

Angus wrote:Nigel is just wrong. People don't want to store movies on hard discs. They want something they can take with them, play in the bedroom (most people don't care a damn for streaming movies within their home)...something they can take to a friend's house....and something that sits in a cupboard in a nice shiny case with pretty pictures on it.

Say that to all the people who carry around thousands of random mp3s on their ipods with little regard to any original packaging or solidity. I for one wouldn't mind having a streaming movie as long as it worked; most packaging can be such a waste. Packaging is just another thing we were conditioned to accept along with everything else that comes off an assembly line.

Most people may desire to own a few movies that may be personal but not 100's or 1000's. That's why digital movies may be a good thing, far cheaper than having to release them on hard copy editions especially if they are relatively unknown films that would otherwise never see the light of day if they depended on a dvd release. A digital mastering will suffice.

Post by **MovieStuff** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 12:20 am

Angus wrote:The porn industry has just announced this weekend that it is backing Blu-Ray.....should secure a format victory for Sony.

But not the type of victory that Sony wants. Sony made it very clear that they would not honor the service contracts of any BluRay duplication house that was servicing the porn industry. The only reason the porn industry finally decided to go BluRay is because some Taiwanese companies said that they would honor any Sony service contract for BluRay duplicators that Sony abandons over the porn issue. So we already have Tawianese BluRay knock-off parts, etc entering the market.

Angus wrote: Blu-Ray is the superior format, and the market has changed from the early 80's whe Betamax lost to the inferior VHS largely due to price.

Not exactly. It is true that Sony was charging a royalty to use the Beta design, while JVC was giving away the liscense for VHS gratis. However, the death knell for Betamax was Sony taking the moral high road and telling duplication houses the same thing the told BluRay duplication houses: If you dupe porn, we won't service you. Only there were no obscure Taiwanese companies to step in and fill the service gap. If there had been, I think Betamax as a format would have survived longer, though the slower head to tape speed made the Beta machines wear out faster than VHS.

We have both BluRay and HD-DVD and, honestly, I can't tell any qualitative difference so ultimately, it gets down to marketing. BluRay disks are easy to spot on the shelf at Walmart while HD-DVD disks you really have to search for. And, when it gets right down to it, "BluRay" sounds cool and has a cool logo. "HD-DVD" sounds as if it were made by a subsidiary of American Motors or ACME brick or something. HD-DVD is just too generic sounding a name to be marketable as readily as BluRay.

Roger

Post by **MovieStuff** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 12:22 am

Patrick wrote: And from the reviews Ive read, it seems that this inconsistency in quality is more common with Blu-Ray titles. ....

We have both BluRay and HD-DVD. All of our BluRay titles work perfectly but I have had 2 out of 5 HD-DVD titles freeze and refuse to play. We changed HD-DVD players and the problem was still there in the same place on the same disks. So, at this point, my experience is that BluRay seems to work more dependably, though they both seem to look the same.

Roger

http://members.cox.net/home-theater/ · Post by **JCook** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 2:33 am

marc wrote:those RCA laser discs that were popular back in the early 80's were really nice. Those things were awesome! Even when you transfered from the disc to a video tape you could see the superior results!

The failed RCA format was called CED and had nothing to do with the more prolific Pioneer laserdisc technology. CED used a stylus similar to record albums.