Apple set to ship Macs with Blu-ray support - report - Page 4

What?

Whatever it is, it has to be something more than a triviality. From what I'm reading, a major upgrade would be out of the question though. That will likely wait until NAB, when they usually show one.

Yes, but that's not standard. You have to pay, what? $120 to $150, extra for it, and it isn't proving popular, with only 120 thousand sold. Barely a blip.

It's pretty clear.

No it wasn't. I said, in so many words, that the reason the Blu Ray disk sales don't totally dwarf HD-DVD disks in sales is a direct correlation to the fact that many of the Blu Ray players that, the user I was speaking with was saying that "Blu Ray sold X amount more" of, is because many of those are strictly gaming consoles. Not strictly Players. If that # was all stand alone blu ray players yes it would probably totally obliterate HD-DVD like that user claimed Blu Ray should have been.

And then you came in and said something to me that looked as if I was saying something different than I was.

So no it really wasn't that clear to me. I don't think you knew who I was talking to, or something.

[quote=Here]



Well however I look at it today - it's all the same thing weather games be movies, or PS3 being all stand alone players. If either happened Blu Ray would obliterate HD-DVD.

I had said originally, that the large number of BD players sold as part of the PS3 sales was considered to be responsible, to a good degeee for the 2 to 1 sales advantage of BD. Your response seemed to say that it wasn't so, that buyers of the PS3 were rarely buying BD disks, because, in a somewhat convoluted sentence, most of the PS3 consoles sold were game machines (re-read how your sentence came out) and so had almost no effect on sales.

I simply refered to that statement, and said that I was sorry if I misinterpreted your meaning.

I kind of thought it would end there, with your saying, apology accepted.\


Yes.

I actually never saw your original post. I must have skimmed past it when reading down to the intended original recipient of my statement.

Happens.

So Blu-Ray has room for a better Sony root kit?

Seriously though, I get a kick out of all this arguing over BR vs HD-DVD, when I'm sitting here looking at an SDTV and a large movie collection that is still approximately half DVD, half VHS. Nobody I know, family or friends, owns an HDTV yet, still too expensive. I've seen the HD demo displays in Best Buy, etc; right now I don't see the level of quality improvement over DVD offsetting the cost of investment.

I'm one of the technological atheists who's going to sit back and wait for the dust to settle, or just wait for an affordable (sub $150) multi-format player.

They've sold 300,000 xBox HD DVD add-ons as of November. When you consider there's only 370,000 dedicated Blu-Ray players, then 300,000 decided HD DVD players is certainly more than a "blip". Then you've got the other 578,000 standalone HD DVD players sold, plus of course the 3.4 million PS3 owners who ended up with a Blu-Ray player by happenstance (less than half of which who use it obviously - given that Blu-Ray disc sales are twice that of HD DVD, not 4.3 times that of HD DVD). I'm not sure what any of this has to do with what we were talking about though, which was internet accessibility and features.


If you don't appreciate the quality difference, then there's no sense in upgrading. The trouble with this format war is that most consumers don't appreciate the quality improvement over what they have now, so nobody's buying. The only reason HDTVs are really starting to take off is because you can hardly buy a television anymore that isn't HD. I don't think High Definition discs are really going to take off until the same becomes true of DVD players - that playback of all formats just becomes a standard feature, rather than a luxury item.

That's not an official number. 120 thousand had been purchased by the end of October. That's official. This number is an estimate. How close to that actual sales will come, won't be known for a few more weeks. A little spin perhaps?

LINKY please ?

Yes but it took nigh a decade to get to that point. I'm not waiting a decade and dealing with the problems thare are inevitable for optical tech waiting for Blu-ray to become affordable. Optical has always been the cheap but slow technology and Blu-ray and HD DVD do not change that. Both are slow as molasses compared to Flash and HDD storage. I'm not buying Quad Core computers only to be hobbled by a slow optical drive. No thanks.


Clearly more than 120k have been sold and these are all dedicated to watching movies unlike "packing" a BD player into a PS3 and hoping that people give a shit about watching movies.


True and quite honestly it's going to take larger screens as well. I can appreciate 720 HD on my 32 in screen but it only looks marginally better than upscaled DVD for many titles. I really think we're going to need to see low cost 42 and 50" sets before people can see obvious qualitative advantages.



I don't know if it's Spin. If we were all forced to use nothing but "official" numbers half the posts in this thread would be invalid. The Xbox add on had the price decrease and bundle and it began to be sold a lot. The numbers should be well over 200k.


Again though it appears to be a fruitless battle though. Once you have a Universal player the need to worry about the war is over. I don't worry about buying DVD-R or DVD+R discs anymore because my drive handles both. Once affordable Universal players are out and someone develops Universal recorders we're aces.

I don't know about that one, but this one certainly looks interesting:

http://www.smarthousenews.com.au/Com...orage/A3X2P7W8

Sort of blows the entire 50 GB 30 GB battle out of the water, doesn't it?

HDD's are not reccommended for storage over a year or so. Studies have shown that HDD's that are sitting on the shef are just as likely to fail as drives being used every day.

For longer term storage of important data, I'd prefer an optical disk, and that's what we do in the photo industry.

No matter how you store, depending on the life of the method, you still must make a "copy to=" schedule.



Well, 3.4 (min) consoles having been sold means that even a relatively small percentage watching movies would be a big number.

The 2 to 1 movies sales advantage comes from somewhere, despite Toshiba bribing Paramount with $150 million to drop BD sales.


I won't deny the 200 number is likely to be correct, but the only number published has been the 120 one for sales through October.


When a universal player comes out that is cheap enough to make a difference, then yes, that's the way to go.

Financial Times says otherwise.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2ca67f30-c...b5df10621.html

The industry may be huge but it's shrinking...fast. I've actually seen 1080p porn and it is awful. These are not naurally pretty girls and the extra resolution brings out a lot of details that aren't sexy. Porn is moving onto the Internet and I think everyone is pretty happy about it.

1999 Senate Hearings on HDTV and the switch over [originally set for 2004] made it a requirement that all televisions sold would have to be HD compliant and affordable to the general consumer.

We haven't seen either yet. They have a year to drive down prices.

They were given an extension to gain ROI and it's been long enough.

Yes it has been long enough. My latest Costco passport has plenty of HDTV options. Nice to see 42" HDTV coming down to $899. My next HDTV is going to be 50" minimum. I don't care if I have to go DLP Rear Projection to get good 1080p performance.

With Costco and Best Buy adding a lot of HDTV offerings its clear they want to be first in the market for their consumers.

I agree about the DLP to get 1080p performance.

I'll never forget standing in the Magnolia Hifi Store in Bellevue, WA in 1999 watching the Space Shuttle launch on HDTV 1080p plasma displays costing $25k. They were for the "early" adopter or so Hitachi and other executives claimed at the hearing.

The Senators weren't amused.

Then came GW and 9/11 and all this progression was pushed into the corner and overlooked.

Sorry bud but try watching picture in picture on the PS3- can't! HD DVD people watch it all the time- it's a real cinema machine not a gaming device that happens to play movie discs. Foot in your mouth! And just because a PS3 can do what you state why can't all blu ray machines do it too? OUCH!!!

Hopefully the recent news of Warner going blu ray exclusive will help end this bickering sooner rather than later.

Apparently you didn't get the memo. It's about two weeks old.

Is it just me, or is the "stud" just randomly jumping from one supposed advantage of HD DVD to another without really staying on the conversation? Debunk one thing and he brings up an unrelated one, which promptly gets debunked. Rampant foot-in-mouth disease there.


There were people in the "vs" thread who kept saying it would never happen. Some of the same people insisted having a format war was good. Warner's press release today must have had them picking their jaws off the floor. Between Warner and Apple (assuming the latter is true), this is a double blow to HD DVD.

PS3 has Profile 1.1, which does PIP with a secondary decoder.

Personally, I don't "get" the idea of PIP, but then, I'm not ADD. I bought PIP on my TV maybe six years ago, and I've never really used it other than to see if it works. It's not even a consideration for me until I see an interesting use for it. I rarely watch with commentaries on, even then, I don't care to see the director's head while playing commentary. Simultaneous green screen and production shots in PIP for the entire movie is a novelty that goes away pretty quickly for me.

Exactly!

[/quote]
There were people in the "vs" thread who kept saying it would never happen. Some of the same people insisted having a format war was good. Warner's press release today must have had them picking their jaws off the floor. Between Warner and Apple (assuming the latter is true), this is a double blow to HD DVD.[/QUOTE]

I agree. The move by Paramount was a blow to BD, but so far, hasn't made a dent in the recent sales figures. I wonder how long they will bite their knuckles while seeing BD sales continue to pound HD-DVD sales, and wonder just what they're missing.

But Warner's action counters theirs. Most studios are exclusively BD. That will make a big difference. If Apple adds Bd, and sells 3 million machines with the players this year, that will sell a lot of disks.

I find PIP to be REALLY annoying.

I'm a pro videographer. I use Final Cut Pro almost exclusively to edit and until recently DVD Studio Pro to deliver my original content.

The truth is FCP and Compressor will output fairly agnostic HD video. I deliver content in both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. I preview on players from Toshiba and Samsung on a Samsung HDTV. I use a Sony BD-RE burner. It all works. There's not much difference between the two in terms of quality of playback of my original content. Of course I have commercial movies in both formats as well. Much of the quality is determined by the way the original was captured (film versus DV) and the encoder used by the manufacturer. Case in point with HD-DVD is "Transformers" and "Ocean's Thirteen". The former has a lot of bright sequences and a ton of CGI and looks fantastic. The latter was filmed in dark settings to set a somewhat darker mood. (These are criminals after all) and on a HD set it doesn't have quite the same feel.

As far as original content, I have to go to Adobe Encore to publish in Blu-Ray, but HD-DVD works with a standard DVD-R. You only get about 30-40 minutes of video, depending on your quality settings on a DVD-R, but it works great! If I use the original files in Encore rather than the Compressor HD output, the quality is a little bit better. Although, when I can afford to upgrade to Final Cut Studio 2, it will probably be on par.

BTW, I can play back Blu-Ray on my Macs (Both Tiger and Leopard) when I have the Blu-Ray burner attached. Leopard will even burn a BD-R image as well as erase BD-RE through disk utility. On Tiger I use Roxio Toast Titanium, which in my opinion, is probably a better solution for BD-R and BD-RE.

Both my HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players have the latest firmware updates downloaded directly to them from the internet. Convenient, but slow. And if you don't have a broadband connection, you're better off downloading the updates to a computer and burning them to CD.

Lastly, the biggest concern I have about the format wars, and one that may likely determine who wins, is how friendly the formats are to consumers. I prefer BD because I can get the hardware for my original content much easier than HD-DVD. But the BD spec changes so often and mostly on the side of the studios, that it can put them in too much in the drivers seat in terms of how content, original or commercial, is controlled. It scares me that there seems to be a real lack of consumer groups participating in either format Alliance. The difference behind the scenes between BD and DVD are enormous, and I'm not just talking about the resolution or hardware.

Apple is smart in not declaring exclusive allegiance to one format or the other. Blu-Ray is the better format for the long term solely because of it's capacity and bit rate. Quality really has nothing to do with it, other wise we'd have been using Beta tapes. At these resolutions, quality is more determined by the player, facility the media was produced at, and the display device than the format. Price will be the major determining factor. I picked up 2 HD-DVD players at WalMart for $99. My Samsung BD was $280. Unfortunately, the commercial movies are about the same $30 - $40 in either format. Blank media costs about the same too with only a few dollars difference (HD-DVD around $15 for single layer, $25 for dual and BD around $20 for single, $30 for dual). Whoever makes a move in the commercial movie prices will probably either draw the wars out longer or seal it up.

That's my 2cents from the trenches.

why do you insist on playing the role of a dingbat?

simple question for you, "How long did it take to get to that $50 for 16GB of flash storage?"

same time scale as optical?

or slightly quicker?

or if BD is settled upon as a standard, then it will drop in price as a storage medium as it reaches mass acceptance/penetration.

It's slow is it? m'kay I get your point, but as a content creator how many copys of your movie/product do you have to send to the duplicators? ..thats right ONE.

how long did the editing take before you burned the disc? oh gosh darn LONGER than it takes to burn the disc, well who'da thunk it.

Funny, just before I read this, I was thinking "is "he" reading the internets in some sort of 3 month old temporal warp?" Everything "he" comes out with is at least 3 months in the past. its almost laughable if it wasn't so annoying.

To be honest, you guys should take him more seriously. Here's some things to note:

- His use of initial caps on all words in some posts.
- His ADHD method of responding to, and bringing forth new issues.

There is a code there somewhere, and it may be important. I think someone should concatenate all his posts and pump 'em through an enigma machine to see what they all really mean.

The future of life as we know it may be at stake.

]
are you talking about plating back commercial disks, or the ones you burned?

This is still a confusing area, because while, in theory, the DRM must be present from the player through the monitor, Sony and others have stated that they won't enforce this until 2009, or so. But, when it is enforced, only a standard rez version will pass through a system without the DRM.


Those prices are high. Where do you get them?

Verbatim disks and Taiyo Yuden, can be had for much less than that. Diskmakers, and even the consumer Cyberguys, has BD-R 25 for $11.29 in packs of 10 with Jewel case. BD-RE 25 with Jewel case for $15.49. HD DVD-R 15 10 pack, Jewel for $9.79, and HD DVD+R DL 30 for $19.29.

That's each, by the way.

I don't have the Diskmakers in front of me so I don't have the price for the BD 50's.

Macs with Blu-ray players? Not until they're burners too I hope.

What I really want is an APPLE TV with a Blu-ray player! That I would buy.

There are burners for the Mac already, have been for a few months.

But, the software doesn't yet allow movie playback.