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The MDN take is spot on. I'm tired of Microsoft and their cronies stifling innovation.

Apple does support HD-DVD (and is a member of DVD Forum - HD-DVD's parent group), but I think they are going to want to push Blu-Ray more - especially when you're one of the Board of Directors.

Are there ANY advantages to HD-DVD or are they just fighting for their platform simply because they developed it?
Reminds me of M$ continuing to sell Windows even though it's riddled with critical flaws and nowhere near as powerful or stable as our beloved OS X!

"Are there ANY advantages to HD-DVD or are they just fighting for their platform simply because they developed it?"

The latter.

If anyone's interested:

DVD Forum (HD-DVD) Steering Committee: http://www.dvdforum.org/about-steering.htm
DVD Forum Member List: http://www.dvdforum.org/about-memberlist.htm

Blu-Ray Board of Directors, Contributors and Members: http://www.bluraydisc.com/Section-13469/Index.html

With the exception of Dell, I'd wager there (generally) appear to be some pretty strong backers for both camps.

May the best format win.

Speaking of best format, I found this interesting tidbit on the Blu-Ray FAQ: http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#1.5 -
"How much data can you fit on a Blu-ray disc?

A single-layer disc can fit 23.3GB, 25GB or 27GB.
A dual-layer disc can fit 46.6GB, 50GB or 54GB.

To ensure that the Blu-ray Disc format is easily extendable (future-proof) it also includes support for multi-layer discs, which should allow the storage capacity to be increased to 100GB-200GB (25GB per layer) in the future simply by adding more layers to the discs.

Are there ANY advantages to HD-DVD or are they just fighting for their platform simply because they developed it?

The major advantage of HD-DVD is that present manufactoring setups for DVD's can be easily adopted for HD-DVD.

BlueRays require a new investment in production equipment, thus will cost more.

HD DVD's hold less, but are cheaper to make, but eventually will die because there is no storage scalability.

M$ back HD-DVD, HD-DVD is delayed. Coincidence? I think not. If nothing else Microsoft's Karma would cause the delay.

Just because Blue-Ray can hold more data does not make it better. I mean if you can fit a HD feature length movie in one disc why would you need any more space? I would not see the loss of more extras like bloopers, trailers, etc as a bad thing. Most of that content is filler material.

HD-DVD had the advantage of being easy to manufacture and therefore bringing to the market earlier. Now that the launch is delayed until 2006 what is the point of going head to head against Blue Ray? I think HD-DVD is doomed. Most people selling these players will look past the content and compare specs. Besides, Blue-Ray will get more of a marketing push by being tied to the PlayStation 3.

Well, Blu-Ray is neat and all, but I'm getting behind HD-DVD because I don't think anyone will ever need more disc space. Besides, I make more money when I can leverage my innovations off of the previous standards.

Oh, I forgot to tell you guys, I'm putting Office and Vista on the 360 only. It'll be so cool to have you guys all running our great software on our great hardware.

"Are there ANY advantages to HD-DVD or are they just fighting for their platform simply because they developed it?"

Yes, the fact that it has DVD in the name. Soon it will be the ONLY advantage it has over Blu-Ray; which is a totally new name for these people. But that's just the really stupid consumers.

The "Smart Shopper" knows better than t and the technical people know that Blu-Ray is far more superior to HD-DVD

I think Blu-Ray is the better format. Sure, right now a high definition movie doesn't completely fill the disc, but they will fill the entire disc later on when movie resolutions go up.

As a film buff, I like a lot of the extras that are on DVDs of movies I enjoy. I'll admit some extras would look a lot better if they were transfered properly. Something there will be no excuse for not doing when movies get hi-def releases, regardless of the eventual format.

And, hopefully, with movies on hi-def discs, the phrase "This motion picture has been modified to fit your TV screen" will die the death it so richly deserves.


"Don't like those black bars on your TV screen? Then stop watching whatever it is you're watching. Because it obviously isn't interesting enough." The Unknown Observer

> I mean if you can fit a HD feature length movie in one disc why would you need any more space?

> I'm getting behind HD-DVD because I don't think anyone will ever need more disc space

Yeah, and nobody will ever need more than 640K RAM (infamous words of Bill Gates back in the early PC days)...

I'm not sure if you guys are being sarcastic or what, but how about their use as backup disks? I remember the days when I had to use boxes of floppy disks to back up my 20MB hard drive (yes, 20 MegaBytes, not GigaBytes). Then one floppy would get a read error and the whole backup pile was worthless.

I personally can't wait for the day when we have 200-500GB disks so that I can backup everything to just one disk. If I had that I'd do full image backups more regularly. You guys that think you'll never need more than 25GB are just short sighted. It's not all about movies. It's about data, data and more data. For you movie-only thinking guys, what about putting a whole season of South Park on one disk? Wouldn't that be great?

"I mean if you can fit a HD feature length movie in one disc why would you need any more space?"

Well for one thing, if Blu-Ray had been around when we offered the Star Wars Trilogy, we woulda put it all on one disk. All HD too.

Do not hold your breath for Lucasfilm to put a whole Star Wars trilogy on the same disk. They would rather sell you three discs that they can charge at three times the price of any one movie.

As for backups, that is not what will sell the formats. High definition video content is the primary content that will be sold on these disks. Anyway, for long-term backup home-burned optical media are a terrible choice. These discs suffer from data rot, especially when kept in less than ideal conditions.

blu-ray disk storage will obviously be a huge advantage next to whatever meager amount the HD guys throw in.....

The PS3, Apple, and Sony will be a big reason to go to their side..... Dell and Microsoft have so many problems.... My mom just got a dell even though i told her to get the iMac G5, and even though it's brand new, 250 gb, special edition..... she's still having problems...

Let's see if the dell and microsoft crash-and-burn-after-one-week happens with this.......

~Caleb

OzzysCross101 got it right. HD-DVD says DVD in the name and that's a huge advantage. If the Blu-Ray camp was smart they'd be spending some money on educating consumers NOW what Blu-Ray means.

The only reason this format war is brewing is greed. The designer of a format gets a royalty off of every disk made (like Sony and Phillips did on every CD). Regardless of quality the format with the highest capacity will win - remember VHS 6-8 hours capacity, Beta 3 - 5 hours capacity. VHS had inferior picture quality but much more storage capacity.

Regardless of what anyone says now some greedy manufacturer will make a dual format player that plays both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD just as the industry adapted to competing DVD-R and DVD+R recordable formats (another royalty war).

Personally, I just want to see Microsoft revealed as the cheesy bunch of non-innovative, monopolistic, copy-cat sleeze bags they truely are.

"Macs King": At least at first, any dual-format player would be prohibitively expensive for any but the most rabid tech-nuts. The problem is that the playback mechanisms for the two formats are significantly different.

is cost, but only at first.

I want somethibg BETTER not something that's CHEAPER (for a short time).

I want BD to win.

Unfortunately, the DRM involved with Blu-Ray is so convoluted that even this superior format may be doomed from the start. Must be connected to the internet to play movie? Your model of disc player may stop working if someone on the other side of the world has figured out how to compromise the DRM. I could go on but here's the sad news:

http://www.dvdfile.com/news/viewpoints/editors_desk/2005/05_18.html

> Unfortunately, the DRM involved with Blu-Ray is so convoluted that even this superior format may be doomed from the start.

The article says that the DRM being discussed is the same for both formats, so this isn't any reason to say Blu-Ray is doomed versus HD-DVD.

I just can't imagine a scenario where say a million machines of a particular model get sold, someone posts a hack of that model on the net to some underground site, and the companies then disable all of those machines en masse. That would cause a class action suit in a minute by all the innocent owners of the machine. That's just not going to happen.

Yes, it's scary to read what is being discussed about various DRM techniques. But it's all 'what if' kind of stuff, where they are trying to cover all their bases as best they can. But assuming the worst case scenario is actually going to happen is ludicrous. No doubt there will be hackers and responses. But the legitimate market forces will always have the final say. If the studios get too heavy handed, the whole industry will collapse. And from the ashes some other solution will emerge. If people are forced to use lower quality analog dupes or whatever because the super-high-quality ones are riddled with too many complexities, than that's what will happen, and the premium systems will just die, along with the premium profits.

"Comment From: Bill
Sep 03, 05 - 12:23 am
Oh, I forgot to tell you guys, I'm putting Office and Vista on the 360 only. It'll be so cool to have you guys all running our great software on our great hardware."

Ain't going to happen, but would be hilarious if it did happen

Many (the majority ?) movies are filmed in the 2.35 aspect ratio, which means that on a 16:9 -- i.e. 1.78 -- aspect ratio, they'll have black horizontal bars across the top and bottom (the infamous "letterboxing").

A 50GB Blu-Ray disk would be cool, as it would make it possible to store both the letterboxed 16:9 version, and an anamorphically squeezed 2.35:1 version, exploiting the full 1080 lines of vertical resolution an HDTV stream is capable of.

You'd of course need either a 1920x1428 fixed-array pixel display, or a 1920x1080 video projector with an anamorphic lens attachment to take full advantage of the available resolution...

I thin the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD issue is similar to the VHS vs. BetaMax fight back in the 70's, or the Windows vs. Mac OS fight. The winner will not necessarily be the best format the winner will be determined by weight alone.

One major technical issue is compatibility with older (current) CD and DVD disc formats.

The HD-DVD format is compatible with current CD/DVD formatst and can be easily incorporated into the current hardware platform. An HD-DVD drive will read older (current) CD/DVD discs.

The Blu-Ray format is not compatible with current CD/DVD formats - and from what I have read it is very expensive to combine the 2 differing technologies into the same drive/player. So when new computers start shipping with Blu-Ray drives, you will have to keep an older drive around to read all of your old (current) CDs and DVDs or reburn them to the new format, which from my understanding if the movie industry gets it's way, no recording capability will be possible.