You can't be serious. Blu Ray has just been delayed as well (Samsung delayed until June) which means HD-DVD has a 3 month head start. They are also half the cost. Pray tell what is going to suddenly stall any momentum? Surely you can't still be buying into "the PS3 is going to take over the world"
1984 normally you're a level headed guy but that statement sounds like it was preceded by a bit too many bong hits.
HD-DVD always had a 3 month head start. Both formats have been delayed so that hasn't changed. Toshiba is facing a lot of problems with production. It's a real mess. That's what happens when you rush things out the door. I sure wouldn't want to buy one under those conditions. Good for the Blu-Ray group for taking their time to get it right from the start. I wouldn't buy a first generation player though, except for the PS3 as that is going to be an incredible value. I doubt there will be significant sales of either format until Sony released the PS3. After that I imagine HD-DVD will rightfully fade into obscurity.
Quote:
Oh yeah Fujitsu, Acer and Toshiba have all announced HD-DVD laptops. That certainly sounds like a format that will only last a generation
You mean the non-Apple computer industry where a generation lasts like six months? Where new models are introduced before the last ones even hit the shelves? Hmmm, I thought we were talking about standalone players considering your stance on computer-related applications of the formats. You are always going on and on about how the superior storage capacity of Blu-Ray is totally irrelevant as a storage medium yet you have no problem using HD-DVD as an example for the same application. Hmmm. Uh-oh, I think it's time for a "TDK hard at work on 8-layer 200GB Blu-ray Disc" link now...
You mean the non-Apple computer industry where a generation lasts like six months? Where new models are introduced before the last ones even hit the shelves? Hmmm, I thought we were talking about standalone players considering your stance on computer-related applications of the formats. You are always going on and on about how the superior storage capacity of Blu-Ray is totally irrelevant as a storage medium yet you have no problem using HD-DVD as an example for the same application.
You don't understand. Murch still thinks both of the formats are useless for backup purposes. He's just saying all those laptops will be used strictly as HD-DVD players.
True, very few people would pay that in large quantitites. I do personally believe the PS3 will debute at 500-600 dollars. However I doubt that it will cause the death knell of HD DVD simply because there's an HD DVD player at the same price dedicated towards video playback. Thus a $499 purchase there means you don't have to fight with anyone over "game time" versus "movie time"
This is such a poor argument considering both devices are designed to be used in a home theater-type environment, of which 99.99% of households will only have ONE. Even if you have a distinct gaming system + HD-DVD/Blu-ray player, you're still going to be dividing time between them.
Since I got my HDTV, I've really been looking forward to more HD content. Up until today, I've been limited to CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, and PBS. Only the HD PBS channel has HD content around the clock. The other channels only broadcast in HD during prime time.
Today, I finally got NESN in HD. They show the Red Sox in New England and they are broadcasting every game in HD this year. Unfortuantely, I didn't find out about this until just after the game ended but I'm looking forward to it from now.
I've been watching the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray 'format war' and haven't decided what I'm going to do yet. After seeing that the Toshiba HD-DVD player was available, I considered buying one simply because I'm anxious to get some HD movies. But then I saw the list of titles that are available this week. Phantom of the Opera, The Last Samurai, Serenity, and possibly Million Dollar Baby. Not exactly a great launch lineup to begin with but apparently stores aren't supposed to be selling those movies yet any way.
Looking towards the next few weeks, there are a couple of movies I might pick up but is it worth spending $500 on a HD-DVD player now to get a 'couple of movies' in the next few months?
I know it takes time for companies to invest in a new format but having barely any movies at launch is not a good sign for HD-DVD. Hopefully there will be more movies available at the Blu-Ray launch.
You don't understand. Murch still thinks both of the formats are useless for backup purposes. He's just saying all those laptops will be used strictly as HD-DVD players.
I've made those statements with qualifiers. Home users will enjoy HD-DVD or Blu Ray backups however I've heard people state that businesses will love using Blu Ray for backups and that's just false. A DLT-V4 holds 320GB on a tape and writes at 20MBps. The drive is $800 and tapes $49.99. Even if a BD recorder was half the cost the media isn't going to be competitive. I know about about backup for SMB clients because that's an area that I support at work. So I know when someone talks about the SMB space and backup that both optical formats will gain little traction.
TDK's 200GB discs aren't part of the specification thus you won't be able to take today's players and magically gain support for them.
Quote:
Even if you have a distinct gaming system + HD-DVD/Blu-ray player, you're still going to be dividing time between them
I'm thinking more of a family setting. Kids are more apt to want to play games while adults might want to watch movies more. Since few houses have more than one HDTV I have a hard time seeing a PS3 as the killer integrated solution.
I'm thinking more of a family setting. Kids are more apt to want to play games while adults might want to watch movies more. Since few houses have more than one HDTV I have a hard time seeing a PS3 as the killer integrated solution.
If you don't have more than one HDTV then having two HDTV capable units (360 + standalone HD-DVD player) does you no good either.
A single PS3 for $699 makes more sense than a $499 HD-DVD player and $349-$399 XBox when you only have one HDTV capable display.
Yes both formats are backwards compatible with your DVDs. Most will upconvert the DVD to 1080 over HDMI at verying levels of quality.
I did some reading on this subject over the weekend and, as with everything related to this technology, my reaction was "WTF?!" I had just begun celebrating what looks like the death of ICT and the availability of full-resolution output over component, when THIS delightful issue cropped up. No upconversion over component.
And how much sense does that make? We are now at the point where you can get HD content over component, but not upconverted SD DVD. It's madness.
A great quote on AICN pretty much sums it up. "What makes this format war so much fun is the sheer half-assedness of it all so far."
I did some reading on this subject over the weekend and, as with everything related to this technology, my reaction was "WTF?!" I had just begun celebrating what looks like the death of ICT and the availability of full-resolution output over component, when THIS delightful issue cropped up. No upconversion over component.
And how much sense does that make? We are now at the point where you can get HD content over component, but not upconverted SD DVD. It's madness.
A great quote on AICN pretty much sums it up. "What makes this format war so much fun is the sheer half-assedness of it all so far."
You probably don't want upconversion in your player - you will get a better image with the video scaler in your HDTV, and even better with an external video scaler like the DVDO VP30.
The higher the MSRP of a box, the more is allocated to the video scaling unit. The video scalers in $3000 HDTVs are probably a lot better than the ones in $500 DVD players, so 480i is the best picture for DVD. Running the 480i image through the crap converter in the player will only degrade the image - particularly because there will probably also be a second conversion in the display to get to the native resolution of the TV.
Ideally, you input the native source resolution (480i for normal TV) into the best video scaler you have, and have that output a matching 1:1 image that fits your TVs resoultion exactly.
I thought that was strange as well until I read that no DVD players have upcoversion over 1080i. Or at least that's what the poster on the thread said. I thought about it and I couldn't think of any current upconverting DVDs with the conversion over component. Perhaps it's an issue with the DVD spec.
A DLT-V4 holds 320GB on a tape and writes at 20MBps. The drive is $800 and tapes $49.99. Even if a BD recorder was half the cost the media isn't going to be competitive. I know about about backup for SMB clients because that's an area that I support at work. So I know when someone talks about the SMB space and backup that both optical formats will gain little traction.
Tape is kind of pointless since hard disks are really cheap, are fast, are actually more robust than tapes, and you can run a RAID 1 more cheaply than a tape-based system unless you have one of those IBM/Tivoli robotic arm silos. The pain of a tape system is that someone (or something) has to swap tapes in and out. Since most companies back-up nightly, this becomes a real pain in the ass, and for this reason most small to medium sized companies don't use tape. Tivoli silos are great, but they're only in the domain of large institutions. The ability to hold a relatively large distribution and library on a single disc that can be read on commodity hardware is definitely of huge value. For example, a software development team could backup a full software repository on a Blu-ray disk, and send it by Fed-Ex to an outsourcees a lot faster than it would take to download 50GB. With that said, HD-DVD would also be OK for this kind of stuff, but it's just that Blu-ray would be better. Especially as capacities improve in time.
The current trend is to backup to a drive based NAS and then connect your tape drive to directly to the NAS for archival. Your backup window shrinks significantly and you can archive on a seperate schedule. This lessens the impact on your network.
The next trend is continuous data protection where, instead of backup up in one batch after hours, you backup the changes as they happen. The new Veritas Backup Exec 10d does this. Toss in their replication software and there's no need to burn and mail anything. I'll check out that Tivoli stuff we don't sell that and it sounds pretty cool.
My point is really if I recommended Blu Ray or HD-DVD as a backup solution for 10 or more nodes to a client I'd probably get laughed at. BU is far more complex than what many here assume it to be.
If Blu Ray wins it will not be because of the superior storage but rather as of today it's the most logical choice because it offers the most studio support.
The current trend is to backup to a drive based NAS and then connect your tape drive to directly to the NAS for archival. Your backup window shrinks significantly and you can archive on a seperate schedule. This lessens the impact on your network.
First off, the you're right that backup has very little impact on BD v. HD-DVD. I was verturing a little off-topic. Second off, though, I'd still position tape as a solution more useful to higher-end clients. For companies that don't have dedicated IT, it seems way easier to just run a RAID 1 and use an offsite 3rd party for fire-protection. These providers would probably use Tivoli silos or whatnot.
But the mailing of discs is a very real solution to, say, clone a database server and send it to your partner for testing. There are plenty of similar scenarios where the advantages of having a 50GB disc are obvious.
I thought that was strange as well until I read that no DVD players have upcoversion over 1080i. Or at least that's what the poster on the thread said. I thought about it and I couldn't think of any current upconverting DVDs with the conversion over component. Perhaps it's an issue with the DVD spec.
First off, the you're right that backup has very little impact on BD v. HD-DVD. I was verturing a little off-topic. Second off, though, I'd still position tape as a solution more useful to higher-end clients. For companies that don't have dedicated IT, it seems way easier to just run a RAID 1 and use an offsite 3rd party for fire-protection. These providers would probably use Tivoli silos or whatnot.
But the mailing of discs is a very real solution to, say, clone a database server and send it to your partner for testing. There are plenty of similar scenarios where the advantages of having a 50GB disc are obvious.
In our case we will be using BD for deliverables.
We have about 24 TB of storage in our department and our Administrator backs up our daily DVD work and the work from the film stages that we need to access using LTO3, but we send out DVDs and MOs to the various territories and BD will simplify and speed up that process.
Some territories can handle SmartJog or DigiDelivery, but in most cases we'll still send out a hard element for redundancy/archive and that will be in the form of a Blu-ray Disc.
I thought that was strange as well until I read that no DVD players have upcoversion over 1080i.
There were several players on the market that upconverted over component; I have one of them. Apparently the mustache-twirling MPAA lawyers swooped down and forced the manufacturers to limit upconversion to digital only. There were several upconverting players that saw firmware upgrades that actually crippled the function, and you can imagine how pleased THOSE owners were.
e1618978, I know the upconversion in the HD DVD players is probably nothing to go ballistic over; what I really wanted, in fact, was for someone to tell me that in a player where all the money has gone into the HD functionality, the upconversion is probably crappy anyway and was included as an afterthought. So thank you for that. It's just one more thing about this technology that makes me gnash my teeth. And I'm already on my third pair.
Comments
Toshiba HD-DVD Guts
Originally posted by hmurchison
You can't be serious. Blu Ray has just been delayed as well (Samsung delayed until June) which means HD-DVD has a 3 month head start. They are also half the cost. Pray tell what is going to suddenly stall any momentum? Surely you can't still be buying into "the PS3 is going to take over the world"
1984 normally you're a level headed guy but that statement sounds like it was preceded by a bit too many bong hits.
HD-DVD always had a 3 month head start. Both formats have been delayed so that hasn't changed. Toshiba is facing a lot of problems with production. It's a real mess. That's what happens when you rush things out the door. I sure wouldn't want to buy one under those conditions. Good for the Blu-Ray group for taking their time to get it right from the start. I wouldn't buy a first generation player though, except for the PS3 as that is going to be an incredible value. I doubt there will be significant sales of either format until Sony released the PS3. After that I imagine HD-DVD will rightfully fade into obscurity.
Oh yeah Fujitsu, Acer and Toshiba have all announced HD-DVD laptops. That certainly sounds like a format that will only last a generation
You mean the non-Apple computer industry where a generation lasts like six months? Where new models are introduced before the last ones even hit the shelves? Hmmm, I thought we were talking about standalone players considering your stance on computer-related applications of the formats. You are always going on and on about how the superior storage capacity of Blu-Ray is totally irrelevant as a storage medium yet you have no problem using HD-DVD as an example for the same application. Hmmm. Uh-oh, I think it's time for a "TDK hard at work on 8-layer 200GB Blu-ray Disc" link now...
You mean the non-Apple computer industry where a generation lasts like six months? Where new models are introduced before the last ones even hit the shelves? Hmmm, I thought we were talking about standalone players considering your stance on computer-related applications of the formats. You are always going on and on about how the superior storage capacity of Blu-Ray is totally irrelevant as a storage medium yet you have no problem using HD-DVD as an example for the same application.
You don't understand. Murch still thinks both of the formats are useless for backup purposes. He's just saying all those laptops will be used strictly as HD-DVD players.
True, very few people would pay that in large quantitites. I do personally believe the PS3 will debute at 500-600 dollars. However I doubt that it will cause the death knell of HD DVD simply because there's an HD DVD player at the same price dedicated towards video playback. Thus a $499 purchase there means you don't have to fight with anyone over "game time" versus "movie time"
This is such a poor argument considering both devices are designed to be used in a home theater-type environment, of which 99.99% of households will only have ONE. Even if you have a distinct gaming system + HD-DVD/Blu-ray player, you're still going to be dividing time between them.
You can do better, hmurchison.
I'm almost ready..just need a HDTV set.
Heh...
Today, I finally got NESN in HD. They show the Red Sox in New England and they are broadcasting every game in HD this year. Unfortuantely, I didn't find out about this until just after the game ended but I'm looking forward to it from now.
I've been watching the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray 'format war' and haven't decided what I'm going to do yet. After seeing that the Toshiba HD-DVD player was available, I considered buying one simply because I'm anxious to get some HD movies. But then I saw the list of titles that are available this week. Phantom of the Opera, The Last Samurai, Serenity, and possibly Million Dollar Baby. Not exactly a great launch lineup to begin with but apparently stores aren't supposed to be selling those movies yet any way.
Looking towards the next few weeks, there are a couple of movies I might pick up but is it worth spending $500 on a HD-DVD player now to get a 'couple of movies' in the next few months?
I know it takes time for companies to invest in a new format but having barely any movies at launch is not a good sign for HD-DVD. Hopefully there will be more movies available at the Blu-Ray launch.
Originally posted by Kolchak
You don't understand. Murch still thinks both of the formats are useless for backup purposes. He's just saying all those laptops will be used strictly as HD-DVD players.
I've made those statements with qualifiers. Home users will enjoy HD-DVD or Blu Ray backups however I've heard people state that businesses will love using Blu Ray for backups and that's just false. A DLT-V4 holds 320GB on a tape and writes at 20MBps. The drive is $800 and tapes $49.99. Even if a BD recorder was half the cost the media isn't going to be competitive. I know about about backup for SMB clients because that's an area that I support at work. So I know when someone talks about the SMB space and backup that both optical formats will gain little traction.
TDK's 200GB discs aren't part of the specification thus you won't be able to take today's players and magically gain support for them.
Even if you have a distinct gaming system + HD-DVD/Blu-ray player, you're still going to be dividing time between them
I'm thinking more of a family setting. Kids are more apt to want to play games while adults might want to watch movies more. Since few houses have more than one HDTV I have a hard time seeing a PS3 as the killer integrated solution.
Since these machines had better be backwards compatible, do either of them upconvert as well as play old dvds.
Or are they going to handicap them to make everyone re-buy their old movies?
Originally posted by ecking
I'm not really educated when it comes to Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD but I've got a quick question.
Since these machines had better be backwards compatible, do either of them upconvert as well as play old dvds.
Or are they going to handicap them to make everyone re-buy their old movies?
Yes both formats are backwards compatible with your DVDs. Most will upconvert the DVD to 1080 over HDMI at varying levels of quality.
Originally posted by hmurchison
Yes both formats are backwards compatible with your DVDs. Most will upconvert the DVD to 1080 over HDMI at verying levels of quality.
Now that's what I'm talking about!
Originally posted by hmurchison
I'm thinking more of a family setting. Kids are more apt to want to play games while adults might want to watch movies more. Since few houses have more than one HDTV I have a hard time seeing a PS3 as the killer integrated solution.
If you don't have more than one HDTV then having two HDTV capable units (360 + standalone HD-DVD player) does you no good either.
A single PS3 for $699 makes more sense than a $499 HD-DVD player and $349-$399 XBox when you only have one HDTV capable display.
Vinea
Originally posted by hmurchison
Yes both formats are backwards compatible with your DVDs. Most will upconvert the DVD to 1080 over HDMI at verying levels of quality.
I did some reading on this subject over the weekend and, as with everything related to this technology, my reaction was "WTF?!" I had just begun celebrating what looks like the death of ICT and the availability of full-resolution output over component, when THIS delightful issue cropped up. No upconversion over component.
And how much sense does that make? We are now at the point where you can get HD content over component, but not upconverted SD DVD. It's madness.
A great quote on AICN pretty much sums it up. "What makes this format war so much fun is the sheer half-assedness of it all so far."
Originally posted by BrunoBruin
I did some reading on this subject over the weekend and, as with everything related to this technology, my reaction was "WTF?!" I had just begun celebrating what looks like the death of ICT and the availability of full-resolution output over component, when THIS delightful issue cropped up. No upconversion over component.
And how much sense does that make? We are now at the point where you can get HD content over component, but not upconverted SD DVD. It's madness.
A great quote on AICN pretty much sums it up. "What makes this format war so much fun is the sheer half-assedness of it all so far."
You probably don't want upconversion in your player - you will get a better image with the video scaler in your HDTV, and even better with an external video scaler like the DVDO VP30.
The higher the MSRP of a box, the more is allocated to the video scaling unit. The video scalers in $3000 HDTVs are probably a lot better than the ones in $500 DVD players, so 480i is the best picture for DVD. Running the 480i image through the crap converter in the player will only degrade the image - particularly because there will probably also be a second conversion in the display to get to the native resolution of the TV.
Ideally, you input the native source resolution (480i for normal TV) into the best video scaler you have, and have that output a matching 1:1 image that fits your TVs resoultion exactly.
I thought that was strange as well until I read that no DVD players have upcoversion over 1080i. Or at least that's what the poster on the thread said. I thought about it and I couldn't think of any current upconverting DVDs with the conversion over component. Perhaps it's an issue with the DVD spec.
Originally posted by hmurchison
A DLT-V4 holds 320GB on a tape and writes at 20MBps. The drive is $800 and tapes $49.99. Even if a BD recorder was half the cost the media isn't going to be competitive. I know about about backup for SMB clients because that's an area that I support at work. So I know when someone talks about the SMB space and backup that both optical formats will gain little traction.
Tape is kind of pointless since hard disks are really cheap, are fast, are actually more robust than tapes, and you can run a RAID 1 more cheaply than a tape-based system unless you have one of those IBM/Tivoli robotic arm silos. The pain of a tape system is that someone (or something) has to swap tapes in and out. Since most companies back-up nightly, this becomes a real pain in the ass, and for this reason most small to medium sized companies don't use tape. Tivoli silos are great, but they're only in the domain of large institutions. The ability to hold a relatively large distribution and library on a single disc that can be read on commodity hardware is definitely of huge value. For example, a software development team could backup a full software repository on a Blu-ray disk, and send it by Fed-Ex to an outsourcees a lot faster than it would take to download 50GB. With that said, HD-DVD would also be OK for this kind of stuff, but it's just that Blu-ray would be better. Especially as capacities improve in time.
The current trend is to backup to a drive based NAS and then connect your tape drive to directly to the NAS for archival. Your backup window shrinks significantly and you can archive on a seperate schedule. This lessens the impact on your network.
The next trend is continuous data protection where, instead of backup up in one batch after hours, you backup the changes as they happen. The new Veritas Backup Exec 10d does this. Toss in their replication software and there's no need to burn and mail anything. I'll check out that Tivoli stuff we don't sell that and it sounds pretty cool.
My point is really if I recommended Blu Ray or HD-DVD as a backup solution for 10 or more nodes to a client I'd probably get laughed at. BU is far more complex than what many here assume it to be.
If Blu Ray wins it will not be because of the superior storage but rather as of today it's the most logical choice because it offers the most studio support.
Originally posted by hmurchison
The current trend is to backup to a drive based NAS and then connect your tape drive to directly to the NAS for archival. Your backup window shrinks significantly and you can archive on a seperate schedule. This lessens the impact on your network.
First off, the you're right that backup has very little impact on BD v. HD-DVD. I was verturing a little off-topic. Second off, though, I'd still position tape as a solution more useful to higher-end clients. For companies that don't have dedicated IT, it seems way easier to just run a RAID 1 and use an offsite 3rd party for fire-protection. These providers would probably use Tivoli silos or whatnot.
But the mailing of discs is a very real solution to, say, clone a database server and send it to your partner for testing. There are plenty of similar scenarios where the advantages of having a 50GB disc are obvious.
Originally posted by hmurchison
BrunoBruin
I thought that was strange as well until I read that no DVD players have upcoversion over 1080i. Or at least that's what the poster on the thread said. I thought about it and I couldn't think of any current upconverting DVDs with the conversion over component. Perhaps it's an issue with the DVD spec.
The Momitsu V880 upconverts over component.
Originally posted by Splinemodel
First off, the you're right that backup has very little impact on BD v. HD-DVD. I was verturing a little off-topic. Second off, though, I'd still position tape as a solution more useful to higher-end clients. For companies that don't have dedicated IT, it seems way easier to just run a RAID 1 and use an offsite 3rd party for fire-protection. These providers would probably use Tivoli silos or whatnot.
But the mailing of discs is a very real solution to, say, clone a database server and send it to your partner for testing. There are plenty of similar scenarios where the advantages of having a 50GB disc are obvious.
In our case we will be using BD for deliverables.
We have about 24 TB of storage in our department and our Administrator backs up our daily DVD work and the work from the film stages that we need to access using LTO3, but we send out DVDs and MOs to the various territories and BD will simplify and speed up that process.
Some territories can handle SmartJog or DigiDelivery, but in most cases we'll still send out a hard element for redundancy/archive and that will be in the form of a Blu-ray Disc.
Originally posted by hmurchison
I thought that was strange as well until I read that no DVD players have upcoversion over 1080i.
There were several players on the market that upconverted over component; I have one of them. Apparently the mustache-twirling MPAA lawyers swooped down and forced the manufacturers to limit upconversion to digital only. There were several upconverting players that saw firmware upgrades that actually crippled the function, and you can imagine how pleased THOSE owners were.
e1618978, I know the upconversion in the HD DVD players is probably nothing to go ballistic over; what I really wanted, in fact, was for someone to tell me that in a player where all the money has gone into the HD functionality, the upconversion is probably crappy anyway and was included as an afterthought. So thank you for that.