I suspect that after the current year Sony will learn to play a little nicer. Or not but its kinda hard to imagine them any worse than before.
Vinea
I don't think Sony is capable of playing nicer. It's in their DNA, or something. They are absolutely sure that their vision of tech is correct and all others must follow.
It's why they keep coming up with proprietary formats that they never drop, no matter how low the adoption rate by other vendors.
I mean, Memory Stick? In a world of ever cheaper commodity memory cards? A company that continues to put memory stick slots on all their gear is quite simply insane, and cannot be expected to behave rationally, even when it is their own best interest.
For better or worse, that's exactly how the current dual-format DVD/HD DVD discs are being done. No big label, one format on each side. I don't mind this much, except for the counter-intuitive small labeling on the inner ring: to play the HD DVD version of the movie (at least with the two examples I've played so far) you have to take the side labeled "HD DVD" and place that side facing down into the player, rather than facing up. I'm sure this will greatly confuse people.
Actually there's a point I was forgetting. With hybrid discs, you must lose the DVD format then so that's a major problem because you can't swap discs with any of your family if they only have DVD players. Everyone you know will have to upgrade to some HD player to play a hybrid disc, whereas no one does for the normal Blu-Ray/HD-DVD discs so the choice is format war vs losing DVD backwards compatibility.
Actually there's a point I was forgetting. With hybrid discs, you must lose the DVD format then so that's a major problem because you can't swap discs with any of your family if they only have DVD players. Everyone you know will have to upgrade to some HD player to play a hybrid disc, whereas no one does for the normal Blu-Ray/HD-DVD discs so the choice is format war vs losing DVD backwards compatibility.
Not necessarily... I believe Blu-Ray supports a mode where Blu-Ray and standard DVD information can be layered together and read from the same side of a disc, with the playback laser focusing through and around the Blu-Ray data at 0.1mm, down to standard DVD data at 0.6mm. Using that technique for the Blu-Ray side of a hybrid HD disc would give you all three formats on a single disc.
It's official the HD hybrid is 2-sided (HD-DVD one side and Bru-Ray other side). Storage capacity is per respective formats (15GB/layer HD-DVD and 25GB/layer Blu-Ray), in single and dual layers for each side.
Comments
I suspect that after the current year Sony will learn to play a little nicer. Or not but its kinda hard to imagine them any worse than before.
Vinea
I don't think Sony is capable of playing nicer. It's in their DNA, or something. They are absolutely sure that their vision of tech is correct and all others must follow.
It's why they keep coming up with proprietary formats that they never drop, no matter how low the adoption rate by other vendors.
I mean, Memory Stick? In a world of ever cheaper commodity memory cards? A company that continues to put memory stick slots on all their gear is quite simply insane, and cannot be expected to behave rationally, even when it is their own best interest.
For better or worse, that's exactly how the current dual-format DVD/HD DVD discs are being done. No big label, one format on each side. I don't mind this much, except for the counter-intuitive small labeling on the inner ring: to play the HD DVD version of the movie (at least with the two examples I've played so far) you have to take the side labeled "HD DVD" and place that side facing down into the player, rather than facing up. I'm sure this will greatly confuse people.
Actually there's a point I was forgetting. With hybrid discs, you must lose the DVD format then so that's a major problem because you can't swap discs with any of your family if they only have DVD players. Everyone you know will have to upgrade to some HD player to play a hybrid disc, whereas no one does for the normal Blu-Ray/HD-DVD discs so the choice is format war vs losing DVD backwards compatibility.
Actually there's a point I was forgetting. With hybrid discs, you must lose the DVD format then so that's a major problem because you can't swap discs with any of your family if they only have DVD players. Everyone you know will have to upgrade to some HD player to play a hybrid disc, whereas no one does for the normal Blu-Ray/HD-DVD discs so the choice is format war vs losing DVD backwards compatibility.
Not necessarily... I believe Blu-Ray supports a mode where Blu-Ray and standard DVD information can be layered together and read from the same side of a disc, with the playback laser focusing through and around the Blu-Ray data at 0.1mm, down to standard DVD data at 0.6mm. Using that technique for the Blu-Ray side of a hybrid HD disc would give you all three formats on a single disc.
It's official the HD hybrid is 2-sided (HD-DVD one side and Bru-Ray other side). Storage capacity is per respective formats (15GB/layer HD-DVD and 25GB/layer Blu-Ray), in single and dual layers for each side.