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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

HD DVD returns from grave, smashes Blu-Ray

Really? Really?

Judging by the image attached I will immediately assume that the people reading this article and actually thinking it means anything are HD DVD fans still clinging to a format that is long gone.

GIVE IT UP PEOPLE IT IS OVER!!!!
 

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Wow......
 
I'd like to see it come back. Picture quality can be and usually is just as good as blu-ray and content is king.

I bought 4 Toshiba HD-DVD players - 1 costco floor model for $50 and 3 others off of ebay for about the same - for playback use at trade shows and home use. Bought about 25 HD-dvd movies and docos for $5 to $10 on blockbuster and other clearance. Had them over 18 months and never a glitch.

Bought the PS3 for its blu-ray. Bluray drive Crapped out after 6 months but didn't notice until too late for warranty because hardly used it (grandson just used it to play downloaded demo games).

Have a samsung Blu-ray now but don't see any big advantage.
 
HD-DVD was a fine format that ended up getting a bum deal, Toshiba didn't effectively market it very well is all that it came down to.

As for this news with China, it's not surprising. The BD licensing structure is terrible. It's bad enough that I was really shocked it didn't play a larger role in the format war -- then again, studios don't seem to care, they just charge more on the consumer end.

I doubt this means we'll see a come-back of the format here in the USA. Over the past several years, the Chinese market has been dominated by alternative formats that are typically easier and cheaper to produce. VCD dominated their video market vs. DVD for nearly a decade.
 
As the famous tagline says: "What happens in China stays in China" :-)

Whatever format rules China, however a huge and important market it is, will not jump over to the rest of the world, certainly not the western countries dominated by corporative mentality and studio connections. As far as we, on this side of the world, are concerned, that war is good and truly over. BD is our format.
 
HD-DVD was the last physical format that I buy.

I've got like 40 or 50 HD-DVDs. I bought up a ton of the classics that I love and decided to call it quits on physical distribution.

I have a blu-ray player for the odd hollywood video rental but the end is very near. XBox is going to be offering on demand 1080p streams this fall. Netflix already offers pretty good SD and reasonable 720p movies.

I'm so tired of scratched disks and skipping with HD-DVD and bluray I just don't want to deal with it anymore. DVD was bad enough, the HD formats seem to skip even if there is a grain of dust on them.
 
Physical disk formats is going away. I bet itunes sells more hd flicks then any disk format in a year or two.
 
Downloads is a mixed minefield of mixed results reliant on an ISP industry which has spotty quality at best.
Physical Media is familiar, accessible and offers top notch quality and special features, it's not going anywhere fast.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
HD-DVD was a fine format that ended up getting a bum deal, Toshiba didn't effectively market it very well is all that it came down to.

As for this news with China, it's not surprising. The BD licensing structure is terrible. It's bad enough that I was really shocked it didn't play a larger role in the format war -- then again, studios don't seem to care, they just charge more on the consumer end.

I doubt this means we'll see a come-back of the format here in the USA. Over the past several years, the Chinese market has been dominated by alternative formats that are typically easier and cheaper to produce. VCD dominated their video market vs. DVD for nearly a decade.
Click to expand...

The difference with DVD formats versus say Beta vs. Vhs is that it is all just data - if the physical media/read head can keep up with the data rate you've got it. VCD was by necessity supercompressed.

DVDs at 4.7GB plus have plenty of space to handle high quality movies and these days it is just pennies more expensive to reproduce than CDs.

And of course REDRAY has shown how much is possible with even more modern compression. It may be that Blu-Ray took so long to dribble out that it may have missed its time too.
 
Michael, I'm nodding my head in agreement... But can't figure out what your post has to do with my post that you quoted. :)
 
I don't know how effective downloaded media is going to get. There is so much copy protection (They advertise the "FREE DIGITAL COPY!" on DVD's these days, but really have any of you tried to get the "Free Digital Copy"?

All the loops you have to jump through to get them is pretty ridiculous in some cases. And to get it on your iPod or something can be a huge hassle.

Most people i've talked to say that just copying their DVD is easier than getting the digital copy.

Then there is the compression scheme, I used Netflix's streaming service for a while, and it looks to be sub-VHS quality in many cases. Then get a high traffic period and their network get's strained? It spends 4 minutes buffering, then gives you a even further reduced quality stream.

It's fantastic when you can get actual HD content (which still runs at a WAY lower bitrate than Blu-Ray) on a good day without having to worry about your stuff getting buffered. Not to mention I prefer being able to pop my movie in and watch it without having to wait for something to load.

With QuadHD resolutions popping up in the next few years, I don't know how streaming is going to keep up with that unless Red starting licensing RedRay's compression scheme for streaming use (not a bad idea..)
 
Don't get too excited about that bit of news u DVD-HD fans. China is trying to isolate itself from rest of the world by "reinventing" almost any basic technology. They also tried it with Windows and Linux :arf: that won't mean a lot in the near future. They don't lack in manpower but they lack in finances and support from the rest of the world (who owns ALL the movie rights!). And by the time they get it working, their technology will be already old and outdated by others. They could only succeed in becoming a trendsetter and inventor of new technologies like Japan did. But the copy-cat path they are taking now by stealing technology from the west is not giving them the power to impose anything to the rest of the world.... neither to their own people who are greedy for western technology :coolgleamA:
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Michael, I'm nodding my head in agreement... But can't figure out what your post has to do with my post that you quoted. :)
Click to expand...

Well first of all I don't always make sense. :biggrin:

But I think I was trying to point out that the quality is in the data, not the player or medium and the marketing aspects are different now. If china decides to make 30,000,000 optical drives that play HD-DVD or some combination of compatible digital formats (like everything that plays mp3 now) they may be able to simply overrun the resistance of the Blu-ray folks.

And copyrights never seemed to be that important in asia, although I don't know if that is changing now - but it seems like with all of these forces coming together - the days of $24-30 blu-ray movie prices will be fairly short.
 
What about Region Code? No Region Coding like HD-DVD, Region C Blu-Ray, Region 6 DVD or something new?

Can HD-DVD discs play on CBHD Player?
Can CBHD discs play on HD-DVD Player?
 
Wesley Scoggins said:
Then there is the compression scheme, I used Netflix's streaming service for a while, and it looks to be sub-VHS quality in many cases. Then get a high traffic period and their network get's strained? It spends 4 minutes buffering, then gives you a even further reduced quality stream.
Click to expand...

I've been using Netflix streaming for hours per day for about a year, with no experience of the issues you describe. i have seen terrible image quality ONLY when they've been dealing with godawful source, as with almost everything from Troma, where the same terrible transcoding can be seen on their DVDs.

Their A-quality stuff -- like the Ring Trilogy -- has been just wonderful. Where Netflix encoding frequently fails is sound -- I've seen them put up films with the director's commentary soundtrack, with the wrong language track, even a classical recital with NO soundtrack whatsoever. VERY rarely, I've seen them screw up an encode visually -- but that is simply shoddy work, the compression tech they're using is more than up to snuff when used correctly.

Of course, Netflix supplies multiple streams for each film, to accomodate low-bandwidth & high latency users. Your buffering issues -- the like of which I've never seen, though I've seen other transient issues attributable to the server network -- are indicative of ISP issues that could also have caused your system to fall back to the low-bandwidth encodes. Before they switched to Silverlight, there was a cheat that allowed you to force the high-bandwidth version every time -- I used that at all times, and never experienced rebuffering or a long wait at the start. There may be a new cheat for the current player, but I've not looked into it as my system consistently defaults to the high bandwidth encode since my isp upgraded service.
 
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Were you doing it on a desktop?

I was doing it from NetFlix's service that is integrated into XBox Live, so maybe that was part of it?

But my experience with it was that I saw quite a few drops in resolution mid-film. I would be watching a movie and about 2/3rds of the way through it'd stop, buffer for a few minutes and then return with what looked like a 380 or so line picture.

It would go from about DVD to good VHS quality, to about YouTube quality often.

Of course, this was months ago when they first started rolling out the service, I am sure that it's changed since then, just my first experiences were just not "ideal".
 
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