Blu-ray conquers all. Also, sound questions

As much as I really enjoy HD movies, I have a problem paying $25-$30 to own them when I can pay Netflix a fraction of that and watch any of them I want.

I’m kinda surprised Blockbuster hasn’t taken HD up yet, I was in there the other day and they’re not renting BD or HD-DVD movies. WTF.

The demand/install base just isn’t there for them to justify the shelf space.
Plus, consider how long it took them to start carrying DVDs in a meaningful way.

Indeed. And if you had actually bothered to read the article it would have answered that for you. Basically, both HD DVD and Blu-ray sales are so absymal that claiming victory right now is fruitless. But, please, just read it.

I also hear UMD movies sold well…for a little while.

Most new DVD & HD players have enough of a buffer so that switching layers don’t cause a studder.

Not at the moment. It could change with a FW update but I haven’t heard any word on it.

Yes they use a higher DD5.1 bitrate for BDs then regular DVDs.

Oh, sorry. By following “it’s over” with “it’s not over” while changing the meaning of “it”, I read your post as an argument about the specific claim you seemed to be refuting. If not then nevermind… :P yeah, THAT “it” isn’t even engaged yet. But it’ll be an important step to reduce the market confusion.

Well, by following “It’s not over because of these important reasons” with “It’s over because you’re a ninny poo-poo head,” you haven’t exactly laid the issue to rest. Or addressed it.

I mean, the issues of Wal-Mart’s aggressive HD-DVD option (and low-cost players) and low sales for all formats don’t magically go away if you ignore them or insult them enough. And what dog do you have in this hunt anyway? What’s the big deal to you if HD-DVD “wins?” Will you suddenly up and die of penis leprosy or something if people don’t all flee HD-DVD for Blu-Ray like a flock of doves scattered by an aggressive 2-year-old? Is Sony holding your cat hostage, threatening to pull its claws out without anesthetic one by one for every HD-DVD player sold?

What’s it to ya?

I think it’s the theory about the cat.

DVD rules all. Everything else is just filler.

It’s not my fault you haven’t been paying attention. Nothing personal, but I’m not interested in wasting time trying to educate people on this one. Firstly because it generally doesn’t work for certain categories (this being one of those), and second because I don’t ultimately care whether people get it or not. If people don’t mind being used to drag out a process that already has a fairly clear set of eventual outcome possibilities, hey that’s their call. It doesn’t affect me either way.

Who will be the next laserdisc? Two formats enter, one format leaves!

Yeah I’ve been saying for a while that both formats are a stopgap until digital distribution takes off and are likely to go the way of laserdisk.

I’ve been saying that low bitrate, no additional content, no ownership will not supersede over high bitrate, feature loaded, physical media anytime soon. It hasn’t happened with music yet and it won’t happen with movies anytime soon.

Laserdisks were huge, unwieldy (flippers), incompatable with prior media, and expensive. These HD discs have no such drawbacks except for the price will will be a non factor by next year if not Q4 07.

Is the next gen war a molehill on the mountain of DVD? Yes. It’s been out for less then a year with players costing $500-$1200 and a huge ugly battle that’s keeping most consumers far far away. Once the price drops and if clear winner emerges it will take off big IMO.

The price needs to drop on lots of things, not just the players. HD TVs, tuners, players and the disks themselves. The cost to do HD is still huge and is probably the biggest barrier to entry, along with how complicated it is to setup. People still have difficulty hooking up their DVD player to a TV with just composite and component options never mind S-video, HDMI and god knows what else. Everything HD needs to be cheaper and simpler before it’ll be as common as DVD.

I agree. Everything should be HDMI. One cable all the audio and video you need. That would simplify a lot of things. Unfortunately to support older equipment we need all these other ports.

But it did happen with music. Look Music went from tape, to CD, to Digital Distribution. Maybe Digital hasn’t fully overtaken CD but the next physical media jump to DVD-Audio/SACD never took root. The jump from Tape to CD/DVD brought not only gains in fidelity but also gains in convenience and features. You need to weigh in the convenience gains along with the fidelity gains. HDDVD/BluRay only really bring gains in visual quality, and limited gains in feature enhancements if any. They dont do anything for the convenience factor.

For most people DVD is good enough, just like CD or even MP3 is good enough. You’ll have the audio/videophiles where it matters but they aren’t the majority. Digital Distribution is the growth market in music, not SACD/DVD-Audio, and likely is going to be the growth market in Video as well.

For the record I own an HD-DVD player, and I still think that both formats will likely end up semi-niche.

Also, look at the number of people that own HD capable sets but aren’t running them in HD, those numbers are always shocking to me.

I’m in this camp myself.

The HD set is one I bought about 2 years ago. Pretty much any decent TV bought in the last 2-3 years is likely to be HD.

But to get an actual HD signal, I’d need to:

  1. Buy a tuner (costs $$ and takes up room that I don’t have where this TV is situated).

2a) Change cable packages. I think I’d need to go from analog to digital, which would cost more, introduce digital compression artifacts, and possibly be incompatible or at least not play well with the old Tivo series 1 I have hooked up to my main (non-HD) TV.

or

2b) Hook up an antenna for over-the-air reception. This would be annoying too. Plus, the HD TV is upstairs, and is used mostly for games (mainly GameCube), and sometimes as background TV when I web surf (especially Cardinals games, which would be nice in HD, but are mainly broadcast on cable, not over the air.)

So there’s a combination of cost and inconvenience which deters me from HD for now.

I’m routinely amused by my wife, watching channels in SD on our HD set when we actually get those channels in HD already. It hasn’t been a big enough deal for her to bother changing her channel-tuning habits.

She’s getting used to preemptively switching to the HD channel if she thinks I’ll be watching too, but still…

For most people, convenience and cost trump quality as buying factors: it’s why MP3 players have taken off while high-end audio formats (SACD, DVD-Audio) have floundered; and why LDs never took off in the first place (they had quality and durability on their side, but were bulky and expensive), while DVDs did. And it’s why HD-DVD and Blu-ray won’t make a dent in DVD’s marketshare until the cost difference comes way down, on both players and media.