“Efforts by Japanese electronics companies to agree on a common standard for the next-generation DVDs have so far failed, a top industry official said on Thursday, heightening chances consumers will be forced to choose between incompatible formats. Kunio Nakamura, president of Matsushita Electric Industry, said talks ‘have essentially resulted in a piece of blank paper.’ Matsushita, which makes the Panasonic brand, is with Sony in leading a group of firms to promote the Blu-ray standard of the next generation DVDs, while Toshiba and NEC have pushed the rival HD DVD standard,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
“Toshiba’s negotiator also said this week that talks had proved difficult on setting a standard for the new DVDs, which are set for mass-market release later this year. The next-generation DVDs are billed as offering cinematic quality images and opening up new possibilities of interactive entertainment. After three years of fighting, the two sides agreed last month to study compatibility to prevent a scenario in which Sony discs do not work on Toshiba players or vice versa,” AFP reports.
“Matsushita said the gap between the two camps has remained wide… Among the Hollywood studios, Walt Disney and Sony Pictures Entertainment back Blu-ray, while HD DVD supporters include Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Brothers Studios,” AFP reports. “Supporters of the Blu-ray technology also include Apple Computer, Dell, Hewlett Packard and Samsung Electronics.”
Full article here.
See the list of Blu-ray supporting companies here.
MacDailyNews Take: Will they be able to get their acts together or not? If history is any guide, probably not.
So what kind of effect can this have on Apple? Since Apple has become so buddy buddy with Sony, will they be installing Blu Ray Drives on all the new computers?
If a standard is not reached, chances are Apple will pick wrong, and end up offering hardware that has no media….
Anyone more educated than I have ideas?
I think they should pick 1000 people at random, qualified by a certain minimum knowledge of both BlueRay and HD-DVD and not affiliated with either group. Let em vote. The winner is what the people want.
>I think they should pick 1000 people at random, qualified by a certain minimum knowledge of both BlueRay and HD-DVD and not affiliated with either group. Let em vote. The winner is what the people want.>
Maybe we should do that instead of the next election. Then the following election, narrow it down to 100 people. and then next, 10 people.
Dank-
Take a look at the Blu-Ray supporting companies list. Apple is not in this alone and a lot of very heavy hitters are in the same camp as Apple.
MW = choice (how appropriate)
Whatever players sell the most early on will do much to make this decision. I have a feeling that PS3 with Blu-Ray will swing the pendulum very hard in that direction.
I so want Blu-Ray to win! It the next generation, whereas HD-DVD is simply an extension of the existing DVD technology. But if we use history as a guide one item stands out that makes me think HD-DVD will be the winner.
Sony has never won a format war to date.
What I hope for is in computers the drives can read/write to both, so I can use Blue-Ray for storage, and HD-DVD for DVDs. Annoying, but doable.
Maybe when HD-DVD becomes old then Blue-Ray 2 will be so great that we will move to that technology.
MW: Will Sony be ABLE to pull it off?
-Wishing and Hoping
“Sony has never won a format war to date.”
The first two that come to my mind are S/PDIF and CD.
Those have both sort of ‘won’
Is anyone else other than myself tired of this? I might be telliing my age, but I went through this with albums, cassette tapes, video tapes, really bad with multitude of recordable dvd standards.
Don’t you think they’d lean by now that competing standards slow down everything and hurt the folks that pay their bills (the consumers). Just like with dvd-R vs dvd+R, and firewire vs usb2, it’s going to boil down to the systems that support BOTH standards will win because the manufacturers can’t move past their stupid egos and simply cooperate with each other.
We’ll suffer for years not being able to play our dvds on everything (or ourselves, make dvds that’ll play on everything), then at some point someone will make a drive reader/burner that’ll work with both. THEN we’ll be able to finally enjoy the promised benefits.
BTW, it has nothing to do with which system is better. SCSI is far better for speed and flexibilty with large data transfers to hard drive systems than ATA, as ata require tons of CPU overhead to move data, where scsi handles this with the drive’s electronics itself.
Firewire is far better for music and video data transfers than usb2 because of how the data is “packaged” for continuous non-interrupted data transfer. Hint: if you’re buying a camcorder, get one with firewire, not usb2. Apple knew what they were doing designing firewire for video work decades ago.
Anyway, it would be the first time in consumer electronics history if manufacturers actually settled this before dragging the consumers through the mud with them.
MW= down, as in “down with incompatible standards”
The who has the most marketing dollars will win.
Not the best product, just the most dollars.
Humans will be lucky to achieve warp powered space vehicles by the year 3000, if this !@#$% keeps up.
ps if companies stopped trying to OWN everything, perhaps things would be better.
If Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard and Samsung are all supporting Blu-ray, the decision has already been made.
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Wow, Apple and Dell on the same side. Time to book that vacation in hell now that it’s frozen over.
From what I hear Blue Ray is better. So let the better format win!
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“Sony has never won a format war to date.”
Weren’t 3.5″ floppies a Sony thing?