Who is going to win the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war?

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2007/10/r...it_could_b.php

Panasonic seems to think Blu-Ray will win by the end of the year, though you couldn't tell me that from the movie selection I've seen for blu-ray.

I still buy DVDs, but in short form lately.

I'm still hesitant, but HD-DVD has been pushing exclusivity all over the place. They also have been offering cheaper prices earlier than Blu-Ray.

I have a feeling HD-DVD will be the leader in value and Blu-Ray will be mainly top shelf material.

So, no format will die.

I too have also stopped purchasing DVDs for the same reason above. For a while there it looked like Blue Ray would be the way to go but then Paramount had to go and pro long the format war by deciding to go HD DVD exclusive.

From the above article:

i don't know why he's so confident, seeing as a bunch of cheap(er) HD-DVD players are set to hit stores this holiday season. Couldn't the studios just pay for the rights again? Or does this mean by the end of next year, I can get my copy of Army of Darkness on blu-ray?

I suspect neither will win this war, at least not for long. You can already direct-download HD movies, and it's only going to get more common and popular as download speeds increase and hard drive space becomes even cheaper. There are still plenty of kinks to work out, security and DRM issues and all that, but a switch to non-disc seems pretty much inevitable at this point.

And for those who say "I want something tangible for my dollars" -- so did I, once upon a time. That's just a mental block, and not one it takes much to get past, in my experience. (A significantly lower price helps, though, and that's something you can bet all involved are going to fight.)

There's a wealth of CHUD input concerning BR/HD in the Peace Out, HD-DVD thread.

BitTorrent.

mmmmm...bittorrent...

Ok. Buy a combo player.

With some players costing about $200 (and some around $150), I see HD-DVD players becoming a popular item this Christmas. However, the discs themselves need to go down in price a good bit as well.

If Blu-Ray unit prices are going down before Christmas, they better drop quick. The holiday season has already begun for some nutjobs.

Love my HD-DVD player and if it skews the other way, then I'll get a Blu-Ray when it gets to a lower price range.

Strange. I find it kind of pointless to buy HD versions. I got a nice LCD big screen and don't see enough of a major differance to warrant $10 more a disc. It is nicer but not $10 nicer. (I own Blu-Ray, by the way)

I went with Blu-ray for the same reason. By the time one format finally bites it, the other should be pretty cheap. No big loss.

I'm the same way in that I'm certainly not going to spend $30 to buy a movie, no matter how much better it looks.

Renting on the other hand is great. I love the detail and sound on the Blu-ray discs and if they carry them I'll rent them every time. Back when I was a member of Blockbuster Online and I got the unlimited in-store rentals it was great because my Blockbuster carried them and I could just pick up HD movies easily.

Since I've discontinued that service I haven't seen a single Blu-ray movie (although I did take the money I was spending on Blockbuster and start using it toward getting HD channels on my TV and a movie tier). I think I may go back to Blockbuster though because I haven't been able to see a fraction of the movies since I've canceled and it's kind of bumming me out.

I personally don't really care which one wins (although Blu-ray winning would save me $100+ so I'm kind of rooting for that) but I just want it to get figured out so we don't get stuck 'buying' crappy 720p digital downloads.

I saw the Toshiba deal at Best Buy last night (HD-DVD player for 3000 bucks plus five free movies; a second player for 400 bucks that comes with nine movies). It certainly seems like an incentive, particularly given how fucking expensive the discs are...

3000 eh?

Don't let the free discs rope you into these things. The selection is terrible and it takes like 2-3 months to get them. At best, you're getting something to trade in or sell off on eBay. At worst, you're excited for a free copy of Stealth.

At any rate, standard dvd's are now ruined for me ever since I found out that NTSC video doesn't run at exactly 30 frames per second. It's 29.97 which means movies have to be slowed down from 24 to 23.976 frames per second in order to be telecined. How I went so long under the wrong impression and just found out about this a few months ago is beyond me.

So, I also fall into the category of "I don't really care which one wins" and "my dvd buying has slowed." The only dvd's I've bought up in the last few months were bargain bin stuff that I could've rented for the same price.

Note: I don't own either format yet, so I don't have a side to cheerlead for just because I own it and don't want to admit I was dumb.

Right now Blu-ray is winning by a wide margin.

1) Blu-ray is outselling HD-DVD by 2:1 in the US, 4:1 in Europe and 9:1 in Japan. Year to date is 66% Blu-ray 34% HD-DVD in the US. Last week was close to 70:30.
2) The installed base of Blu-ray players is much larger. About 2,000,000 vs. 320,000.
3) Blu-ray has many more studios and manufacturers that support it than HD-DVD.
4) Player prices keep droping; expect stand-alone players to have price parity with HD-DVD in time for Christmas.
5) Blu-ray is just a better format, 50 GB from a dual-layer disk instead of only 30 for HD-DVD.
6) Blu-ray has better copy protection. You may hate that, but studios love that shit.

A couple of studios are HD-DVD exlusive because they were paid to be for 18 months by Toshiba a few months ago. Once that expires in about a year they'll switch back to selling Blu-ray to follow the sales. Some of the big studios are Blu-ray exclusive too, of course, only the higher Blu-ray sales will actually keep them there.

Side note: Toshiba is the main maker of HD-DVD player hardware and part of the HD-DVD consortium. Dreamworks and Paramount are probably banking that their Blu-ray profits over the next 18 months would be less than the $150 million Toshiba paid them. Apparently everyone else told them to pound sand.

Here is the breakdown on studio support:

Blu-ray exclusive: Sony, MGM, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate
Blu-ray and HD-DVD: Warner Brothers, New Line
HD-DVD exclusive: Paramount, Dreamworks EXCEPT FOR Steven Spielberg's movies. He owns the rights to them and supports Blu-ray, so they're coming out on Blu-ray.

So that makes the score Blu-ray 7, HD-DVD 4. And 2 of the HD-DVD supporters were paid $150 million by Toshiba to switch to HD-DVD for 18 months. When the time is up they'll switch to whichever is selling better, i.e. Blu-ray. Note that the top 3 studios in terms of box office are Sony, Disney and Fox, which are all Blu-ray exclusive. And #4 is Warner Brothers, and they do Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

And Blockbuster and Target are Blu-ray exclusive now.

The difference between 24fps and 23.976 is so negligible, it seems odd that it would ruin DVD for you.

It ruins it for me in so much as I wish I'd never learned those facts because I would have less of a reason to ever worry about upgrading to high def. Of course, PAL transfers have the problem of speedup so I'll stop complaining now.

A good litmus test on the success (or lack thereof) of HD-DVD will be seen with sales of next week's Transformers HD disk. The first blockbuster disk from the studio post their exclusivity agreement. If it sells better than 300 did on the combined format (400k so far), things will get interesting.

We're still a ways off from that happening on a massive scale.

I made a long post about this in another thread a while back, but the shorthand version:

- Most people's stock cable/DSL lines still take quite a damn while to download one HD movie that would range between 40 and 60 gigs.

- There needs to be substantial infastructure overhauling for everyone in the country to get HD movies downloaded quickly, on demand. The current copper basis for all of our telecom infastructure won't ever be fast enough (usless you're living close enough to a hub, and even then you're going to be getting far slower speeds than you would be with fiberoptics).

- Hard drive space still isn't where we need it to be for this model to be functional. A terabyte of space will only hold about 15 or so HD movies (maybe less, depending on if they're at the upper end of the file size spectrum). And right now, the word terabyte is just now creeping into the general populace's lexicon. And while we're now at the point where gigabytes flow fast and free, it won't be like that with terabytes at first. It will be a long, long while before there's a hard drive easily and cheaply available that will have enough space to hold any sort of substantial movie collection.

- The aforementioned security issues.

We will be there eventually. I'm not arguing that. But there are current obstacles that prevent it from being so easy that the general consumer will be able to adopt it. As such, the current format war is certainley a viable (if redundant) one.

Anyone else get the feeling that if Toshiba and Sony could have agreed on one format, High-def disks would be selling at an order of magnitude larger rate?

If there was just one format, I'd own it right now instead of waiting for all this bullshit to come to an end.

No, I really don't. The surveys and reports that show things like (and I'm paraphrasing the numbers, don't remember the exact ones) 80% of PS3 owners don't know they have a Blu-Ray player, 70% of 360 players don't have an HDTV, and 70% of HDTV owners are happy with SD DVDs really makes me think HD DVDs (of any kind) aren't enough to win mass acceptance over just yet.

What could I do to change your mind? A gift certificate? Soothing words and a kind tone?

Coming from an attorney, I just can't trust that comes without strings attached.

Target is not Blu-ray exclusive, but they do afford more shelf-space to it than HD DVD. And the top three studios so far this year are Paramount (HD DVD exclusive), then Warner (neutral), then Disney (Blu-ray). So it evens out a bit. The #1 and 4 films of the year are Blu-ray exclusive -- Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End -- and the #2 and #3 films, Shrek the Third and Transformers, will only be available on HD DVD.

It evens out.

Of course, Blu-ray films also lean heavily on the MPEG-2 and AVC video codecs, while HD DVD uses the less intensive VC-1. Once again, it basically evens out.

I don't think you can really say that different amount of disc space 'evens out' because one format primarily uses a more lossy format so the entire movie will fit on one disc.

Blu-ray in its earlier discs avoided using VC-1 (even though it's a supported format) because theoretically you can get less compression artifacts with some of the other codecs than with VC-1.

In the end though, it seems like most any movie that is being released on both BR and HD-DVD is going to use the same encoding as the HD-DVD so as to avoid having to do multiple encodings.

The truth is though that no matter how you cut it, Blu-ray has more space than HD-DVD and both have the same codecs available for them. Blu-ray will however, always have the most space on it.

You can say whatever else you want about the formats but that's the one totally and completely guaranteed positive that Blu-ray has over HD-DVD.

I could play total HD DVD fanboy here and mention the 51GB discs, but that's not fair as they aren't compatible with current hardware. Yes, Blu-ray has bigger capacity. But I find it hard to care when so many of the exclusive studios waste it.

Blu-Ray
more space
unstable compatibility due to profile updates, BD+
more studio support

HDDVD
stable platform
better interactivity
less space.

I'd love to go blu, but I don't want to buy a platform that has an outdated player every few months, let alone price being more. The T51 would screw over HDDVDs advantage of stable platform, and previous players wouldn't be compatible.

Sorry to say but Toshiba and Sony BOTH screwed the consumer. Maybe in a year or 2, their format war will lower the prices of players, but discs are damn expensive. Besides we all don't have 50" hdtvs to notice 1080p.

Sadly after getting free HD local channels, I want the war to end fast and now.

That can't be right. I never doubt the stupidity of people, but that seems impossible to me.

Yeah, I wasn't saying it was utilized right now, I'm just saying it's there. While new 51GB HD-DVD discs could be created, they aren't in the standard spec.

Just like Ethernet is a requirement for HD-DVD but not Blu-ray. It's something that is a 100% plus for HD-DVD since every player is guaranteed to have it while Blu-ray does not.

Yeah, I'm not saying that either one is better, I'm just saying that the 1 thing you can't take away from Blu-ray is its better available storage. That's pretty much its shining area.

Also, the 'better interactivy' for HD-DVD is really just 'simpler interactivity' and factors into the 'stable platform' point you made above.

Blu-ray uses a special version of Java which is needlessly complex for many purposes. The fact that HD-DVD hides that complexity makes it easier to get initial interactivity but does take away some of the flexibility of the BDJ spec. So theoretically you would be able to get better interactivity from Blu-ray down the line.

The BD+ is an entire different can of worms (but you'd think studios would like it since it is an extra layer of DRM).

Yeah, I was wrong. Did a search and the actual number is 30% of PS3 owners.

I could be wrong, but I don't think there is any difference between the runtime for a movie because of the NTSC/24fps difference. If you watch a DVD (for a big-budget movie) on an HDTV, it'll be the way the movie was supposed to run.

The transfer on the DVD will be a 480 p progressive transfer that runs at 24 p. When you watch the movie on a standard definition TV the DVD player will perform 3:2 pulldown which converts 2 out of every 5 frames into interlaced images that will conpensate for that tiny difference in frame rate.

That's what I've gathered from reading up on DVDs the past several years. I could've read it all wrong, but I hope not.

EDIT: Be grateful that you didn't have to deal with the PAL format. For the slight increase in resolution, you'd have to deal with an inconsistent method of dealing the the relatively larger discrepancy between film's 24 fps and PAL's 25 fps. The film will usually run a little shorter. The truly maddening part of it is that the often neglect to pitch down the audio to compensate for the speed increase. Robert Downey Jr.'s narration in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang sounds like he took a bit of helium before each line!

That is one of the advantages of HD DVD/Blu-ray: no NTSC vs. PAL nonsense.

I was actually curious about this. With the advent of HDTV, is there really no more TV signal difference to deal with between different regions (other than region coding)?

If region codes weren't a problem, could I easily play a UK HD/Blu-Ray in the US?

PAL/NTSC isn't the same situation as region codes. HD DVD is region free (which has seriously pissed off New Line, to the point they're holding back titles so they can't be imported), while Blu-ray is very much designed in a similar way to DVD.

I know they're not the same thing, but it was one of the things that could prevent people from importing/exporting movies (whether that was the intent or not). With DVD, even if you had a region free player, the PAL/NTSC issue could get in your way.

This is not the case with the new HD media, correct?

I'm actualy considering breaking my oath (of waiting for the format war to end) and buying a 360 HD DVD drive solely for Transformers. Someone talk me out of it.

Transformers wasn't particularly good?

And even if you enjoy it beyond the fact that the movie isn't any good, repeat viewings will hurt the movie more and more and more... IN HI-DEF!!!!

Come...join us on the dark side. I'm picking up Transformers in HD-DVD tomorrow (granted they have any...took Best Buy a week to replenish their 300s when I missed the first batch).

There are some HD-DVDs that are just breathtaking. And you can get Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in hi-def. Who doesn't want that? No one. Or at least no one I want to know.

Immediate must-buy for me.

To be precise, they're only selling Blu-ray players in stores going forward. They're selling discs, just more of Blu-ray, presumably because it sells about twice as well on average.

We're kind of dancing around the central point, though: Blu-ray is outselling HD-DVD by 2:1 in the US, 4:1 in Europe and 9:1 in Japan. There are more Blu-ray players in houses by a wide margin, and more studio and manufacturer support for Blu-ray than HD-DVD.

Christmas PS3 sales alone may kill HD-DVD, let alone the new cheaper (and better) standalone players coming out now. But my wild guess is that the format war ends when Toshiba's agreement with Paramount and Dreamworks expires and they flip to Blu-ray to follow the higher sales figures.

Now things are getting interesting. Lots of folks look at the Amazon sales lists to get an idea of who is hot and winning at the current moment. Blu-Ray has repeatedly overall won each week in software sales something like an average of 60:40. The HD-DVD camp threw out the big guns today with Transformers on HD-DVD...thinking they will win the week and be able to tout the win in press releases, etc.

But Sony (or maybe Disney to be precise) made a very, very smart move. They ran a Buy One Get One promotion on certain titles. Including the first two Pirates films. And they skyrocketed up the Amazon DVD charts as a result. So now all bets are off on who wins the week. Folks are saying that if the BOGO promotion beats Transformers Sony will use this to crucify Paramount and HD-DVD. Conversely, if Transformers does better than expected and HD still wins the week against the BOGO promotion, HD-DVD will do the same to Sony in the press.

The gloves are off!