Blu-ray vs. DVD/VOD (2009)

marz, one additional question. Will 2009 finally be the year that the chief evangelist for BD in all of these threads actually buys a BD player/PS3?

All I know is that PS3 sucks and XBox 360 rulz! Or was that the other way around? I can never remember. Do we hate Sony or Microsoft more?

If Blu-Ray was only for movies, I'd say DVD/VOD may succeed as a convenience over quality measure. However, Blu-Ray will succeed as a low-cost, high capacity storage medium that allows you to write once and keep it as backup.

DVD outnumbers Blu-Ray on Amazon by 100 to 1 so Blu-Ray is by no means a highly successful format but rather still in the emerging stage. now that it is the decided standard though, it's just a matter of time before the library grows.

I think Sony need to back down with whatever conditions they are making that is putting manufacturers like Apple off from adopting it. They just do way too much in the way of DRM and licensing that they end up hurting their own business.

Please mods, for THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT IS HOLY, CLOSE THIS THREAD BEFORE IT EVEN GETS STARTED!


Thank you.

Can we add AppleTV to the title?

Because a next-gen AppleTV (dressed in MacBook Black & Silver) outfitted with an upscaling DVD, burn to DVD function, iPhone games library and a proper remote will have Blu-Ray quivering in a corner like a corrupt Chicago governor.

brd is overpriced, underperforming rubbish and it blows...hard.

a perfect companion for Apple's hardware I'd say.

Blu-ray's biggest obstacle is His Steveness -- even though the latest version of Toast works quite nicely for burning them (it doesn't try to reincode -- yay!). However, I wouldn't do a professional project with Toast. It's okay for dailies, though.

The licensing plan for Blu-ray sucks, especially for the small video companies that video school plays, for instance. The DRM sucks. There's moving parts, fur cryin' out loud. (You wonder why I say this? Go here: http://www.panasonic.com/business/pr...2-hd/index.asp ) In other words, everything about Blu-Ray sucks, in one form or another.

Anyway, His Steveness views all future video distribution plans as happening from servers. That's all I can figure.

I'd Like That answered also. I feel entitled to ask, because I own a stack of BD discs and a player.

Other posters who championed a dead format I won't mention, but announced their love of "The movie, not the format" and apparently won't buy BD even at half the fire sale prices that the dead format eventually sold for, arn't really in a position to ask though.



They know who they are.

ok, I guess you missed the memo, but it's been out for a while, their IS no god, She doesn't exist.

..an then theres the bit about, umm, like , yeah, if you don't like the topic, don't read it... or something.

they are both dead formats, just SONY bribery is keeping one on life support longer.

I applaud Marz. Those of us who were against BR's restrictive DRM wish everyone had followed his example.
Talk up the tech while never actually purchasing it.

Ok, well I can start my participation in this thread by saying I have finally purchased a bluray player. And no I did not get a PS3, just a good deal on a regular sony player.

First purchase? The Dark Knight

FWIW, my buddy's shop that I've freelanced in from time to time has purchased four Blu-Ray players. I've got one of them to test. My pal also bought HD-DVD at a firesale price, simply because he could encode HD video cheaply enough for trade show displays, and the like. So I have experience with both, and a lot of other stuff that is now obsolete, thank you very much.

*/sarcasm mode ON

I reiterate: His Steveness has declared all HD video will come from servers! Bow down before him, ye hapless peons! Get rid of the moving parts fetish! You will be assimilated!

*/sarcasm mode OFF

I've been format neutral for a few months now, but I am still buying even more HD-DVD software on firesale deals.

Blu-ray movies are still too expensive for most, but we all knew that already.

Anyway, this thread title should be "PS3 format vs. DVD/VOD" instead. I am not sure whether blu-ray is still considered future technology because it does not seem to have much future. It is rather an obsolete one in the very near future. I will be happy to have Sony bribe for couple more years for the format existence before a successful next gen HDM format is available. Perhaps, blu-ray/DVD may be the last optical disc format as movie storage/delivery?

Yeah, i'm not too impressed with the bluray. It is painstakingly slow to load, holy crap. I don't know how people even begin to play games on a PS3.

I love HD, I do, but with the price and hassle of it I don't see it going very far.

/checks iTunes store

Still no 720p. Most not even 480p.

/rewatches Dark Knight in 1080p on Blu-Ray

i already have the plan to buy a japanese blu-ray player soon. becoz these 1080p hi-def movies really capture me. i'm also a hdtv fan, but blu-ray seems flexible. 2009, we'll see blu-ray's boom, i bet.

Blu-ray, souffle, g'day, whoop de-do! What's the big deal? this is like the switch from every other content format beginning with the story around the campfire to cave painting to moveable text with some guy by the name of Gutenberg. Is DVD really that bad?

More junk to buy and more junk to go in the ground when some other format comes along! It's all just entertainment, which is something we all take for granted. As feature-itis continues is unyeilding march towards digital oblivion, why do we need more crap that will just end up collecting dust or fill up the ground until there no more ground to fill?

I'll not buy a single Blu-ray disc or player for the simple fact that I can live my life with more junk that that will someday go the way of the dodo.

I think in the end, Jobs will have to "throw in the towel" and allow Blu-ray drives into MacBooks, iMacs and Mac Pros for these reasons:

1) The price of Blu-ray hardware has dropped dramatically, which may allow the Blu-ray licensors to lower their costs (I'm sure the Blu-ray licensors would give Apple a big discount on licensing fees if they can convince Apple to start offering Blu-ray drives in most of their product line). You can buy new Blu-ray discs for not much more than you paid for a regular DVD release.

2) The imposition of broadband download capacity limits by ISP's may thwart the idea of downloaded HD movies, even with Comcast's 250 GB/month limit. This is far less an issue with music since even with Amazon.com's MP3 download service a full album is relatively small in size. As such, if you want HD movies you'll have to end up buying Blu-ray discs or renting them through a service like NetFlix.

I'm going to vote for upscaled DVDs remain good enough, for most people, long enough to stall the uptake of Blu-Ray until it gets killed outright by downloads.

I thought that anyway, but in this economy? Unless Blu-Ray players drop below $100, the Blu-Ray catalogue becomes ubiquitous and deep at Netflix and Blockbuster, and the rental and purchase rates drop to rough parity with current DVDs-- so that a Blu-Ray player becomes an easy decision come DVD player replacement time-- not gunna happen.

I'm sure this has all been hashed out somewhere in the depths of however many goddamn threads have had to die to forward this discussion, but, for most people, Blu-Ray just doesn't have the kind of "wow" factor, compared to upscaled DVD, that DVD had over VHS. You go to Best Buy, you see the rig, it looks nice, but not gotta have it better than what you already have. The 720p output of even a downmarket DVD player on the average under 50" screen looks good to people. Good enough.

Broadcast HD? Sure, because NTSC video was the ass end of video technology dragging backwards compatibility from the freaking 40s.

But I predict that by the time the Blu-Ray ecology and price structure come into line with DVDs, we'll have started to look on optical discs the same way we now look at CDs.

Which, by the way, doesn't preclude the use of discs as a storage and backup medium. The only CDs in my house are for burning.

I realize I'm in a minority, which serves to strengthen your point, but I still look on CDs as my audio distribution medium of choice. They're lossless and DRM-free. (And yes, I can hear the difference between 256kpbs MP3 and lossless.)

Since I still can't buy lossless audio over the Internet from any kind of major store, I'll speculate that any download delivery method for video is going to be a decades away from reaching BluRay's quality.

I'm sure that sooner or later there will be a "good enough" downloadable video store. Just not "great."

I predict that the iTunes store will offer similar-quality video bitrates to BluRay when we're watching holographic movies delivered on little crystals. Complete with smell track.

All I know is that movie downloads will not take off in Canada until the criminals running our ISPs are put in jail and bandwidth caps are upped or removed completely.

For 45 dollars a month, some people are getting 20 GB download caps. Yes, folks, that's not a typo...20 GB! 5 HD movies would bust the limit.

Of course, this is probably the worse case scenario up here. This 20 GB cap is brought to you by the criminal provider called Videotron. For the same price, Rogers at least offers a 60 GB download cap. However, that is *still* grossely insufficient for today's internet needs.

With YouTube videos, iTunes Store movies, effin' huge point updates from Apple, huge updates to games like World of Warcraft, or trying to participate in the City of Heroes public beta and having to download a 2.2 GB client when you've reached 18 of the 20 GB ten days before the month end, 20 or even 60 GB is simply insufficient.

After having spoken to a Videotron rep, they've assured me that they'll keep picking my pockets. And the Canadian government is protecting these criminals.

I certainly agree with your standards: for me, CD quality lossless is my storage medium of choice, and the average video dl (iTunes Store included) is just barely tolerable.

However, the trajectory of genuinely mediocre, lossy audio encodings and their relentless takeover of the market suggest that most people have some threshold of tolerance for subpar.

As various compression and mastering schemes improve, you hit a point, well before what the audio or videophile would consider optimal, where convenience or cost or ubiquity trumps quality and the market settles on a format.

I think, that by the time iTunes offers video that rivals Blu-Ray, most people will be treating video the same way they treat audio: as a semi-disposable consumable that favors quantity or quality. Blu-Ray quality file sizes will be the provenance of enthusiasts only; most folks will be perfectly content to have DVD quality, if it means that they can carry around 50 movies on their pocket device and shoot them to the nearest display wirelessly.

addabox your argument is missing content. Most people watch movies and listen to music for the stories they tell or to fill a sound space. And for that you don't need high quality. I downloaded an old Dr. Who episode form iTunes. The quality was awful, but I quickly got over it when I got into the story. Similarly I downloaded a modern TV show, and while I was initially disappointed with the quality it quickly became a nonissue after I got into the story. If you're only criteria for a movie or TV show is the number of pixels you are wasting your time. The story is frontmost, everything else is secondary.

Audiophiles have a better argument because everyone at some time or another does sit back and really concentrate on the music. And some music does demand high quality bit rates. There is no movie or TV show that has needs that kind of demand.

Apple is not going to adopt blu-ray until drive prices drop, you can say they are low now if you want but for a laptop they aren't. In addition to not being cheap for laptops Apple will almost completely require a burner option in BTO specs. So unless a burner is around $200 for a laptop (but more like $100) I doubt you will see blu-ray just yet. One note though is, prices on drives of any kind, hard drive etc, in general, are dropping very fast now days.

My take on VOD is like this. Back in the day DVD was pretty cool you got to get your major collectable titles all shelved and then after 3-4 years things started getting cramped with all of the DVD cases. At that point, in steps renting DVDs, instead of collecting DVDs for a shelf life, because you start to realize "hey, I won't ever watch these again, why buy them?". So as buying DVDs transitions to Renting DVDs, I think renting DVDs will transition to Downloading VOD...

At the last juncture you have renting any Disc vs VOD, the real battle. For me its pretty clear. Ultra major releases, Star Wars, Matrix, LOTR and maybe even Mummies would be stored on the shelf in Blu-Ray form and a few oddities here and there, where as everything else would be rented or vod, which I wouldn't be keeping so I guess if I rented I would get the best quality right? If available on blu-ray at blockbuster you go with blu-ray...

I would like to add that I have seen Swordfish BD vs Swordfish DVD (with PS3 upscale) while I was trying to convince someone that getting blu-ray is so much better than getting DVD. Thing is, I thought the difference side by side was going to be like going from old NTSC 640x480 TVs to HD 1080 TVs. I don't know if you remember that day when you realized how great HD is. I thought looking at the different images would I feel the same way and just make me completely think about blu-ray... but it didn't really have the same effect. DVDs aren't that bad compared to a BD, one thing about blu-ray I have to say is, $40 for a title is kinda crazy.

Laters...

Stores try to setup machines so that HD looks much better side by side vs SD. They even have demos of differing cables where the most expensive HDMI cable looks much better than the cheapest one. It's all marketing to get you to spend the most amount of money.

As you can see in this comparison of ATV, Blu-Ray, DVD and cable:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/art...ource=rss_tech

there's no real reason to go for Blu-Ray based on video qualtiy. Like I say though, Blu-Ray will take off as a storage format and people will buy Blu-Ray movies as a result. I can see it being a very slow uptake though.

Huh? Are you sure you're responding to me? Because you appear to be more less agreeing with something that I'm saying, and disagreeing with something that I'm not.

For some reason we like to watch The Sound of Music every Christmas season, which we did last night on LD (I double-dipped on only a few titles that I owned on LD when DVD came out). I did get caught up in the story but I also kept thinking how soft the picture was, especially on outdoor scenery and on faces and how much better it would have been on BD.

I also agree that a good upscaling DVD player can produce a very appealing picture and that on a 36" or smaller TV most people wouldn't notice the difference between DVD and BD. On a 50" and above the difference is noticeable.

In my mind the greatest difference between DVD and BD is in the audio, that's where BD blows DVD away. An example, the DVD of The Polar Express looks very good on an upscaling DVD and the sound track is nice. The scene where the train arrives at the boy's house has OK LFE but on the BD that scene is awesome, it's like you're actually standing next to a steam engine, you not only hear the engine, you feel it.

I've bought into BD. I don't know if it will supplant DVD or whether it'll exist parallel to it much like LD did to VHS; however if it gets the studio support that LD did then I'll be satisfied.

Blu-ray movies aren't unreasonably priced. At $24.99 for many of them they are less than DVD movies were when DVD debuted, and they are far less than VHS movies were when the studios first started releasing their movies on tape.

If my MacBook Pro could play Blu-ray movies I'd be satisfied. I'm planning on buying an external Blu-ray drive to use with my MacBook Pro but can't find any recommended for Apple's computers. With the new high resolution screens on most laptops these days, regular DVD movies look fuzzy after being upscaled to resolutions much higher than actual size. That's why I want Blu-ray for my MacBook Pro. I don't have a TV and don't expect I will ever have one as the computer should be able to do it all. I live in a very modest square footage so the computer has to play many roles.

All true, but DVDs were unquestionably better than the VHS tapes they were competing with, and VHS wasn't competing with anything. Blu-Ray is competing with a product (DVD) that is viewed as probably 80-90% as good as BR is. And the other product is much cheaper.


Perhaps I'm wrong here, but I still don't think there's any way to reliably play BR discs unless the computer's OS supports its stupid DRM. That's why there are no recommended externals for Macs yet.

One thing that may have an effect on this is that more and more people are buying HD sets. It's my feeling that as the public becomes more comfortable with HD they'll want something that represents the best picture their set is capable of. You really can see a difference even if it's DVD upconverted. And they don't have to abandon their DVD library. Computing is a seperate issue but may follow suit if there's wide spread adoption elsewhere.

How does someone who references the state of the economy in every PO post turn around and say that?

A MERRY HD XMAS TO ALL OUR READERS!

I really hope you all get the HD goodies (installed) that you wanted this xmas

who knows maybe 2009 REALLY WILL be the year of HD for us Mac users. as always a LOT of us would settle for the inbuilt storage that BD drives would offer.. but lets see.

Have a good one, and enjoy your content first and your medium second

Because people have already purchased many HDTVs. I bought mine in 2002!

Remember a figure from earlier this year? 8 out 10 new TVs sold are HD.

Plus there was a big glut of them sold during this summer's olympics.

In case you haven't noticed the prices have come down alot. Soon all TVs sold will be HD. And I don't think people are going to stop buying new TVs do you?

Blu-Ray and Digital Movie/ Video on demand both have licensing issues holding back their potential. The later will eventually win out, its a matter of when the industry (Apple included) stops trying monopolize everything themselves and start thinking big picture. There needs to be a file standard and a common set of technology, personally I'd base it on AppleTV/ iTunes. For the immediate future DVD is the king.


Not too many non-HD TVs with a digital tuner and with the end of analog broadcasts coming on February 17, not much reason to sell a TV without a digital tuner.

Exactly.

Folks,

I hate to break out the bad news, but HD video downloads through the Internet is a non-starter in the USA as it currently stands.

I cite the following issues:

1) Media service providers will have a compromise video quality to get HD video files to something resembling a reasonable size--if you don't mind a 3-4 GB download per movie!

2) Even with Verizon's FIOS service, you need to seriously tie up the Internet connection for long periods of time to download movies, unless the connection is 50 megabits per second download speeds or faster (the number of homes with such fast connections are extremely small indeed).

3) Internet Service Providers are imposing monthly download limits because a) they fear too much video downloading will overwhelm the current network infrastructure and 2) they want to discourage torrent traffic. This has the unfortunate side effect of making HD video downloads not very practical.

4) The price of Blu-ray players and discs have nose-dived, especially within the last six months. We will see BD-Live enabled players from the major manufacturers costing well under US$200 by the end of March 2009, and the price of discs have dropped a lot lately, too.

I was considering Blu-Ray for archiving recently to replace my DVD burner as you can get one for under £200 that burns from Toast. Trouble is, the 4x BD-R discs are still over £5 each. Although 25GB is a good disc size, writable DVDs are £0.25 each so it's 20x more money for 5 times more space.

To backup 500GB of data would cost me £100 and require 20 discs burned, each taking 25 minutes = 8 hours.

To backup DVD would cost about £25. It would probably take much longer to backup though and the space taken up isn't worth it.

However, I can buy 2 x 500GB hard drives for £100 and backups are easier and quicker - around 5 hours over USB 2. There's no risk of making a £5 coaster and I can do two backups that I can keep up to date easily.

I still like solid state backups as a simple fault can wipe out a whole hard drive but it's still a bit pricey. I'd like to see 8x BD-R come down to about £5, either that or 50GB 4x discs down to that price as this brings the cost alongside using hard drives.

For movie watching, the cost of the drives are getting pretty good but I'm still moving towards VOD myself. I recently looked into the itunes store and the content is building up. They have a lot of TV shows. There are still quite a lot missing though and the pricing is just too high. The content providers need to realize that simply putting a digital download in place is advertising space too and the distribution cost is minimal so the prices should be significantly lower than a physical disc. You don't get extras and bonus features either.

The Dark Knight is on itunes for £10.99 but the 2-disc DVD is £11.99. I bought the DVD and the choice was easy. I don't get some DRM-ridden movie I have to keep authorizing machines to play. For £5.99, I might have thought otherwise.