Does anyone here watch the Universal HD channel? For the longest time they have been showing a Toshiba commercial for HD-DVD with some dude from the Sopranos at every commercial break. For quite a while this was the only channel I had ever seen it on and seeing as how it's Universal it made sense since they are exclusively HD-DVD. However, I noticed recently they are now airing a Blu-Ray commercial on the same channel and it's getting a lot of airtime. I did a double-take the first time it aired since they had been plugging the hell out of HD-DVD for so long. Coincidence or a sign they are indeed going format neutral?
WOW very interesting indeed! could spell changes ahead
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1984
Remember back in the early days of this thread when the advantage of HD-DVD was a going to be lower disc cost? Not only is there is no price advantage but one studio even proposed to put both formats on a single disc!
I think the real question for members of this forum is: If Apple officially supported one format over the other would you switch sides?
Sadly for a few people here it likely wouldn't make one jot of difference. I think though if Apple went with the format I hadn't chose, I would let any decision I might make RE a shift of opinion slide for 6 months, to see what happened.
I'd really like to hear others opinions on this question though.
WOW very interesting indeed! could spell changes ahead
Sadly for a few people here it likely wouldn't make one jot of difference. I think though if Apple went with the format I hadn't chose, I would let any decision I might make RE a shift of opinion slide for 6 months, to see what happened.
I'd really like to hear others opinions on this question though.
Buffalo Japan has a new drive that those still laboring over the decision between Blu-ray and HD DVD will love. The Buffalo drive is a USB drive and can playback either HD format and it can burn BD-RE and BD-R discs as well.
There is no HD DVD burning capability built-in, but the drive can burn both normal CDs and DVDs. Those not wanting an external USB drive can opt for an internal unit. No firm pricing is known for the external drive, but word has it the internal version will sell for 47,000 Yen, which would be about $406, which is way less than the $1000 I-O Data wants for their Blu-ray only USB drive. The USB version would cost a bit more, but the pricing would likely be close. The big rub here is that there is no word on if the drive will be shipped to America.
Should we expect Hacks for the 360 to get BD working with it?
Thats £200 over here, thats getting close to my tipping point if it would work with my mac mini
I need a few reviews and I need to feel that both formats will be around for YEARS and I'd be pretty much ready to consider it, but its gonna take some pretty big things or till this time next year for me to be convinced that HD-DVD will survive for YEARS. at whitch time drives like this will be a LOT cheaper.
(Of course the tipping point in cost goes down as time marches on.)
Slightly off-topic, but was anyone ever able to finagle the xbox 360 HD DVD add-on into working with a Mac? It is just an external USB device after all; I thought surely someone would have frankensteined a driver together.
Slightly off-topic, but was anyone ever able to finagle the xbox 360 HD DVD add-on into working with a Mac? It is just an external USB device after all; I thought surely someone would have frankensteined a driver together.
Initially, someone had tested, got it working just by plugging in with a mac on Tiger. However, lack of software support would not allow HD-DVD disc recognition & playback. Bootcamp to windows xp/vista should work. BTW, PowerDVD recently updated their software to allow HiDef playback with intel GMA950 and even newly released Macmini should work fine as HTPC for HiDef media playback.
Someone had brought up HiDef media playback with Leopard, but it can well be just a rumor.
if you have time.... you may find some usefuly info here:
Not that it's any of your beeswax, but LDs are still useful. There are still quite a few movies and TV shows that were once released on LD but not yet on DVD and probably not for a while. This may shock your puny mind, but a massive segment of the studios' back catalogs have yet to be released on DVD.
Agreed. I still watch my LD collection. I could be wrong but isn't the original Star Wars theatre release only available on LD?
I really don't want to delay DVD purchases for another 18 months, nor do I want to purchase any more Standard-Definition discs; what's a consumer to do?
If you have plenty of discretionary income, enough to buy another HD player if you make the wrong choice, then pick one of the HD formats, probably the one with the most titles that appeal to you.
On the hand, if you can't afford to make a mistake on a loosing format or formats that never make it past almost niche status, then stay with SD-DVD.
WOW.... your own interpretation is interesting indeed, but why do I feel like I'm wasting time again. \
I can squeeze one more game before bed time...
Bite, even though I'm a BD supporter and would like to see HD-DVD go away, I still try and be fair. While vinea may be a little over the top on how he presents it, to the best of my memory he has his facts and inferences right-on with his DVD adoption post.
Bite, even though I'm a BD supporter and would like to see HD-DVD go away, I still try and be fair. While vinea may be a little over the top on how he presents it, to the best of my memory he has his facts and inferences right-on with his DVD adoption post.
Good luck on the game.
I just didn't want to be dragged onto the spin fest as his focus of discussion kept changing. I just didn't see it going anywhere in positive direction.........
As it is for many, I'm in HT hobby to enjoy it as much as when I play decade old starcraft online with family friends. But having pointless discussions online is something I would call as joyful hobby of mine.
Anyway, just looking at the direction this thread is going, Blu-Ray is definitely winning online...... but I've been hearing that Blu-Ray had won ever since PS3 came out. Of course some of us know that the claim was/is remote from the reality. I do have to give credit to BD supporter group and mainly Sony as a master of viral marketers, though. It made believer out of many of you.
It seems that something big is expected out of CEDIA 2007, maybe it will be big enough to shake up the HiDef format war.
In the mean time, good luck supporting your format online guys....
I just didn't want to be dragged onto the spin fest as his focus of discussion kept changing. I just didn't see it going anywhere in positive direction.........
Please. The only thing you were challenged to do to was come up with a reference to show that most folks were paying $1K for their DVD players. The "focus" was to refute your unsupported assertions. You keep changing your story, I keep finding articles to disprove it.
The only spin in this particular discussion is YOURS. I've said multiple times that if every studio dropped Blu-Ray tomorrow I would cheer and buy a HD-DVD player the next day.
I do have to give credit to BD supporter group and mainly Sony as a master of viral marketers, though. It made believer out of many of you.
That's not really fair to say that supporters of BD have been persuaded by some kind of viral marketing campaign, as if they're not able to rationally prefer one over the other. It's not that, really. It's more like some large, hard-to-define, amorphous, snowballing, word-of-mouth, media-manipulated, growing, shared, internet-born, digitally-distributed force-field that just makes me prefer BD over HD. Nothing viral about that.
Please. The only thing you were challenged to do to was come up with a reference to show that most folks were paying $1K for their DVD players. The "focus" was to refute your unsupported assertions. You keep changing your story, I keep finding articles to disprove it.
The only spin in this particular discussion is YOURS. I've said multiple times that if every studio dropped Blu-Ray tomorrow I would cheer and buy a HD-DVD player the next day.
As is, I'm redoing my HT so I can wait.
Vinea
LOL...... I can't believe you're still caught up on $1k dvd player for enthusiasts. I thought one of your own references did answered that question.
Link is from your own source: Read the last two sentences on the article.
On the high end of the market, purchases of players priced at $1,000 and up continued to grow, capturing 8% of purchases in January 1999 up 58% from December 1998.
That's not really fair to say that supporters of BD have been persuaded by some kind of viral marketing campaign, as if they're not able to rationally prefer one over the other. It's not that, really. It's more like some large, hard-to-define, amorphous, snowballing, word-of-mouth, media-manipulated, growing, shared, internet-born, digitally-distributed force-field that just makes me prefer BD over HD. Nothing viral about that.
haha.....
this reminds me...... maybe all of us should just step back and go enjoy whatever that's entertaining.......... I better go check when I can have my HD-DVD copy of Face Off.... better yet..... I should stop coming back here so often...
Yeah...a whole 8% in Jan 1999 but only 5% in Dec 1998. Wanna bet that by December 1999 that the amount is far less than even 5%?
Quote:
Originally Posted by bitemymac
But most video enthusiast were in fact true high end users at the time, most enthusiasts did pay $1k+ for their first DVD player to fuel the niche market.
So in 1998 out of 1M players a whole ~50,000 high-end player or so were sold. So out of $422M revenue only $50M was generated "enthusiasts" at the 1K mark. A nice sum but hardly the driving factor for DVD funding.
I would argue that all 1M players sold in 1998 were bought by videophiles/enthusiasts/early adopters.
Quote:
Do you want me go find a receipt?
No, I want you to stop whining when proven wrong. You tried to make the case that the format war is a good thing by saying that the first 4 years of DVD was driven by the enthusiast market and 1K pricing. Numbers you pulled out of your ass and is unsupported by history.
I think I've shown it wasn't 4 years and the $1000 DVD market, while nice, wasn't the driving factor NOR was the average sale price very high.
The format war may have forced Toshiba into dropping pricing faster but for the consumer the acceleration of price drops by at most 1 Christmas is far offset by the confusion the format war is generating as seen by the actual rate of combined HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player sales (ignoring the PS3 for the moment).
Had both MS and Sony adopted a single High-Def optical disc format for the current consoles then we'd have 16M players today. Had there been only ONE High-Def format MS would have been hard pressed not to include it as standard for the 360.
Blu-Ray or HD-DVD hardly matters which. Blu-Ray is slightly better simply because its a little more mature and a little larger. That's useful not just for the computer market but also the video enthusiast market as we see for HD camcorder. But in reality HD-DVD is at most a year behind in those uses and had there been only a single format likely a small HD-DVD burner head might have been developed by Hitachi by now anyway.
There may be Blu-Ray fanboys here but the HD-DVD ones are worse. At least there ARE technical benefits to Blu-Ray AND its winning with 4M players sold. Given that, my inclination is that the faster HD-DVD dies the better it is for everyone.
Comments
Does anyone here watch the Universal HD channel? For the longest time they have been showing a Toshiba commercial for HD-DVD with some dude from the Sopranos at every commercial break. For quite a while this was the only channel I had ever seen it on and seeing as how it's Universal it made sense since they are exclusively HD-DVD. However, I noticed recently they are now airing a Blu-Ray commercial on the same channel and it's getting a lot of airtime. I did a double-take the first time it aired since they had been plugging the hell out of HD-DVD for so long. Coincidence or a sign they are indeed going format neutral?
WOW very interesting indeed! could spell changes ahead
Remember back in the early days of this thread when the advantage of HD-DVD was a going to be lower disc cost? Not only is there is no price advantage but one studio even proposed to put both formats on a single disc!
I think the real question for members of this forum is: If Apple officially supported one format over the other would you switch sides?
Sadly for a few people here it likely wouldn't make one jot of difference. I think though if Apple went with the format I hadn't chose, I would let any decision I might make RE a shift of opinion slide for 6 months, to see what happened.
I'd really like to hear others opinions on this question though.
WOW very interesting indeed! could spell changes ahead
Sadly for a few people here it likely wouldn't make one jot of difference. I think though if Apple went with the format I hadn't chose, I would let any decision I might make RE a shift of opinion slide for 6 months, to see what happened.
I'd really like to hear others opinions on this question though.
Walter, meet multi-quote.
How about a USB Combo drive?
A stand alone USB Blu-ray/HD-DVD drive for about $400 anyone?? is this good and cheap enough for Bite to put in his HTPC setup?
Buffalo Japan has a new drive that those still laboring over the decision between Blu-ray and HD DVD will love. The Buffalo drive is a USB drive and can playback either HD format and it can burn BD-RE and BD-R discs as well.
There is no HD DVD burning capability built-in, but the drive can burn both normal CDs and DVDs. Those not wanting an external USB drive can opt for an internal unit. No firm pricing is known for the external drive, but word has it the internal version will sell for 47,000 Yen, which would be about $406, which is way less than the $1000 I-O Data wants for their Blu-ray only USB drive. The USB version would cost a bit more, but the pricing would likely be close. The big rub here is that there is no word on if the drive will be shipped to America.
Should we expect Hacks for the 360 to get BD working with it?
Thats £200 over here, thats getting close to my tipping point if it would work with my mac mini
I need a few reviews and I need to feel that both formats will be around for YEARS and I'd be pretty much ready to consider it, but its gonna take some pretty big things or till this time next year for me to be convinced that HD-DVD will survive for YEARS. at whitch time drives like this will be a LOT cheaper.
(Of course the tipping point in cost goes down as time marches on.)
waiting IS good
Walter, meet multi-quote.
?????
For those of you interested
How about a USB Combo drive?
A stand alone USB Blu-ray/HD-DVD drive for about $400 anyone?? is this good and cheap enough for Bite to put in his HTPC setup?
When it drops to 100 US green backs, I would think it would be a nice product.
But... is USB2.0 fast enough for 1080p24 in MPEG2 & Multi-Channel PCM audio?......
I'm sure VC-1/AVC & advanced compressed lossless audio would be fine though.
Slightly off-topic, but was anyone ever able to finagle the xbox 360 HD DVD add-on into working with a Mac? It is just an external USB device after all; I thought surely someone would have frankensteined a driver together.
Initially, someone had tested, got it working just by plugging in with a mac on Tiger. However, lack of software support would not allow HD-DVD disc recognition & playback. Bootcamp to windows xp/vista should work. BTW, PowerDVD recently updated their software to allow HiDef playback with intel GMA950 and even newly released Macmini should work fine as HTPC for HiDef media playback.
Someone had brought up HiDef media playback with Leopard, but it can well be just a rumor.
if you have time.... you may find some usefuly info here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forum...115&order=desc
Not that it's any of your beeswax, but LDs are still useful. There are still quite a few movies and TV shows that were once released on LD but not yet on DVD and probably not for a while. This may shock your puny mind, but a massive segment of the studios' back catalogs have yet to be released on DVD.
Agreed. I still watch my LD collection. I could be wrong but isn't the original Star Wars theatre release only available on LD?
I really don't want to delay DVD purchases for another 18 months, nor do I want to purchase any more Standard-Definition discs; what's a consumer to do?
If you have plenty of discretionary income, enough to buy another HD player if you make the wrong choice, then pick one of the HD formats, probably the one with the most titles that appeal to you.
On the hand, if you can't afford to make a mistake on a loosing format or formats that never make it past almost niche status, then stay with SD-DVD.
WOW.... your own interpretation is interesting indeed, but why do I feel like I'm wasting time again.
I can squeeze one more game before bed time...
Bite, even though I'm a BD supporter and would like to see HD-DVD go away, I still try and be fair. While vinea may be a little over the top on how he presents it, to the best of my memory he has his facts and inferences right-on with his DVD adoption post.
Good luck on the game.
Agreed. I still watch my LD collection. I could be wrong but isn't the original Star Wars theatre release only available on LD?
I believe the re release of the single films had the original theatrical release on it, copied from an LD transfare!
I bought a copy, watched it, and han shoots first!! just as I remember it!
However the PQ on the updated versions is stunning by comparison.
Pretty keen to buy them YET A-F**KING-GAIN when dickhead decides he needs a big cash injection. {sigh}
Hey, I know HD formats sales numbers are open for debate, but has HD/BD sales reach a 1% level yet compared to SD-DVD?
I'd like to know that too!
Roughly drafted will have an artical on HD-DVD vs Blu-ray soon I believe
Bite, even though I'm a BD supporter and would like to see HD-DVD go away, I still try and be fair. While vinea may be a little over the top on how he presents it, to the best of my memory he has his facts and inferences right-on with his DVD adoption post.
Good luck on the game.
I just didn't want to be dragged onto the spin fest as his focus of discussion kept changing. I just didn't see it going anywhere in positive direction.........
As it is for many, I'm in HT hobby to enjoy it as much as when I play decade old starcraft online with family friends. But having pointless discussions online is something I would call as joyful hobby of mine.
Anyway, just looking at the direction this thread is going, Blu-Ray is definitely winning online...... but I've been hearing that Blu-Ray had won ever since PS3 came out. Of course some of us know that the claim was/is remote from the reality. I do have to give credit to BD supporter group and mainly Sony as a master of viral marketers, though. It made believer out of many of you.
It seems that something big is expected out of CEDIA 2007, maybe it will be big enough to shake up the HiDef format war.
In the mean time, good luck supporting your format online guys....
I just didn't want to be dragged onto the spin fest as his focus of discussion kept changing. I just didn't see it going anywhere in positive direction.........
Please. The only thing you were challenged to do to was come up with a reference to show that most folks were paying $1K for their DVD players. The "focus" was to refute your unsupported assertions. You keep changing your story, I keep finding articles to disprove it.
The only spin in this particular discussion is YOURS. I've said multiple times that if every studio dropped Blu-Ray tomorrow I would cheer and buy a HD-DVD player the next day.
As is, I'm redoing my HT so I can wait.
Vinea
I do have to give credit to BD supporter group and mainly Sony as a master of viral marketers, though. It made believer out of many of you.
That's not really fair to say that supporters of BD have been persuaded by some kind of viral marketing campaign, as if they're not able to rationally prefer one over the other. It's not that, really. It's more like some large, hard-to-define, amorphous, snowballing, word-of-mouth, media-manipulated, growing, shared, internet-born, digitally-distributed force-field that just makes me prefer BD over HD. Nothing viral about that.
?????
You reply to each person individually. Use multi-quote and save some space!
Please. The only thing you were challenged to do to was come up with a reference to show that most folks were paying $1K for their DVD players. The "focus" was to refute your unsupported assertions. You keep changing your story, I keep finding articles to disprove it.
The only spin in this particular discussion is YOURS. I've said multiple times that if every studio dropped Blu-Ray tomorrow I would cheer and buy a HD-DVD player the next day.
As is, I'm redoing my HT so I can wait.
Vinea
LOL...... I can't believe you're still caught up on $1k dvd player for enthusiasts. I thought one of your own references did answered that question.
Link is from your own source: Read the last two sentences on the article.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...38/ai_54556603
On the high end of the market, purchases of players priced at $1,000 and up continued to grow, capturing 8% of purchases in January 1999 up 58% from December 1998.
Do you want me go find a receipt?
That's not really fair to say that supporters of BD have been persuaded by some kind of viral marketing campaign, as if they're not able to rationally prefer one over the other. It's not that, really. It's more like some large, hard-to-define, amorphous, snowballing, word-of-mouth, media-manipulated, growing, shared, internet-born, digitally-distributed force-field that just makes me prefer BD over HD. Nothing viral about that.
haha.....
this reminds me...... maybe all of us should just step back and go enjoy whatever that's entertaining.......... I better go check when I can have my HD-DVD copy of Face Off.... better yet..... I should stop coming back here so often...
LOL...... I can't believe you're still caught up on $1k dvd player for enthusiasts. I thought one of your own references did answered that question.
Link is from your own source: Read the last two sentences on the article.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...38/ai_54556603
Yeah...a whole 8% in Jan 1999 but only 5% in Dec 1998. Wanna bet that by December 1999 that the amount is far less than even 5%?
But most video enthusiast were in fact true high end users at the time, most enthusiasts did pay $1k+ for their first DVD player to fuel the niche market.
So in 1998 out of 1M players a whole ~50,000 high-end player or so were sold. So out of $422M revenue only $50M was generated "enthusiasts" at the 1K mark. A nice sum but hardly the driving factor for DVD funding.
I would argue that all 1M players sold in 1998 were bought by videophiles/enthusiasts/early adopters.
Do you want me go find a receipt?
No, I want you to stop whining when proven wrong. You tried to make the case that the format war is a good thing by saying that the first 4 years of DVD was driven by the enthusiast market and 1K pricing. Numbers you pulled out of your ass and is unsupported by history.
I think I've shown it wasn't 4 years and the $1000 DVD market, while nice, wasn't the driving factor NOR was the average sale price very high.
The format war may have forced Toshiba into dropping pricing faster but for the consumer the acceleration of price drops by at most 1 Christmas is far offset by the confusion the format war is generating as seen by the actual rate of combined HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player sales (ignoring the PS3 for the moment).
Had both MS and Sony adopted a single High-Def optical disc format for the current consoles then we'd have 16M players today. Had there been only ONE High-Def format MS would have been hard pressed not to include it as standard for the 360.
Blu-Ray or HD-DVD hardly matters which. Blu-Ray is slightly better simply because its a little more mature and a little larger. That's useful not just for the computer market but also the video enthusiast market as we see for HD camcorder. But in reality HD-DVD is at most a year behind in those uses and had there been only a single format likely a small HD-DVD burner head might have been developed by Hitachi by now anyway.
There may be Blu-Ray fanboys here but the HD-DVD ones are worse. At least there ARE technical benefits to Blu-Ray AND its winning with 4M players sold. Given that, my inclination is that the faster HD-DVD dies the better it is for everyone.
Vinea