Apple To Back Blu-ray and HD-DVD?

[Yannick]

yawn! the disc is dead.
(dying, at least.)

I personnally don't agree. Movies you can buy and download still have poorer resolution, only one language, no bonus. Plus it takes so much room on your hard drive! You end up having to burn them anyway on a disc, or having to buy two huge hard drives for backup/safety purpose in case your hard drive dies. I own something like 150 DVD. That's about 1 TB (2 TB if you backup)… You really can't compare it to the music situation. Movies on DVD are cheaper than music CD. I get brand new DVDs through internet for an average of 7 € ($8.77). For me to buy a movie on iTunes, it would have to sell for 3 or 4 € ($4 or $5) to be worth it.

 

[krestfallen]

I do , I have 140Gb of Photos from my DSLR (and previous digital cameras) putting this on 3 discs rather than 40 discs would be great

I also have 28Gb of music, backing up form itunes to 1 disc rather than 8 would also be useful

word *knock on table*
i got the same problem

 

[Yannick]

I do , I have 140Gb of Photos from my DSLR (and previous digital cameras) putting this on 3 discs rather than 40 discs would be great

I also have 28Gb of music, backing up form itunes to 1 disc rather than 8 would also be useful

External drives are very easy to break beyond repair with osx (3 different NEW external drives, 3 different disc manufacturers discs, and the longest they lasted without dying so badly they needed an RMA was 72 hours) and discs take up less space, and you have the possibility of having 3-4 copies.

+1

it was the same with DVD instead of CD

 

[krestfallen]

So why not just use an external HD?

because this can die easily. should we buy 5 external hd's to backup the backup disk of the backup disk? no. 3 or 4 hd's i owned died since the last 10 years or so. i think it's too risky.

 

[dr_lha]

Before people start quoting VHS vs Betamax, can people use actual facts rather than urban legends?

For example: Betamax being superior to VHS is a myth, most people cannot tell the difference between the two formats. Read this excellent article:

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,881780,00.html

The real reason VHS beat Betamax is the following:

1. VHS had longer tapes, Betamax's tapes were smaller, and Sony had difficulty coming out with larger capacity tapes. Faced with one system that's standard tapes could record 1 hour and one that could do 3 hours, most people chose the latter (VHS).

2. Sony's tight grip on the Betamax format kept prices high and innovation low. VHS decks were cheaper and made by more manufacturers, and hence consumers had more choice.

3. The porn industry chose VHS.

 

[krestfallen]

1. VHS had longer tapes, Betamax's tapes were smaller, so had difficulty coming out with larger capacity tapes. Faced with one system that's standard tapes could record 1 hour and one that could do 3 hours, most people chose the latter (VHS).

2. Sony's tight grip on the Betamax format kept prices high and innovation low. VHS decks were cheaper and made by more manufacturers, and hence consumers had more choice.

3. The porn industry chose VHS.

so it's kind of a mixture here.
1. more capacity -> blu-ray
2. lower price -> hd-dvd
3. porn industry choses the cheapest format -> hd-dvd

the big thing will be the players. blu-ray players had a bad start (frames were dropped, image quality wasn't that good, delays).

it looks like blu-ray will have a hard fight.

 

[BornAgainMac]

HD DVD for movies and Blu-Ray for data. Problem solved.

Personally, I would rather just have digital downloads from a high speed download service and store them on my own storage whether it is on DVDs, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD as data. For large downloads, I would like to go to a local video store and download them to my laptop using Firewire 800/400 or USB but that is probably too far in the future.

 

[kingtj]

re: Who needs to burn 30-50GB of data

Never underestimate the storage capacities people will require! It wasn't THAT long ago I remember having a 10 *megabyte* hard disk drive on my old TRS-80 computer and thinking "This thing is HUGE! I can store every program I own on here AND all my data!" And we all know the ever popular "640K should be enough for anyone!" quote regarding RAM memory.

But if you're talking about simply the "here and now", yeah - the typical user won't have a good reason to store 30-50GB on a single piece of media. On the other hand, someone who works with video a lot easily might. (Think of the idea of making a single disc that contains a full collection of HD video clips you made and edited so you could copy/paste them into future projects, at will.) Sort of like those "50,000 clip art images collection!" CDs people buy, except your own, personal HD video version.

I'd also imagine this would be nice for corporate backups. People currently shell out around $90-100 each for DLT or LTO type backup tapes that hold maybe 40GB or so of compressed data. They could substitute one with HD-DVD or Blueray media and have more reliable backups with easier, quicker retreival too.

That comment about not including the burner is interesting, and I'm at least trying to give it some more thoughtful consideration. Who really needs to burn 30 - 50 GB of data? For backup solutions, wouldn't just getting a huge external hard drive be more practical? Portability might be a factor there, but external drives aren't that cumbersome I don't think. I'm thinking that the majority use of those HD media burners would be to copy movies with illicit applications. Could Apple put in place some protection framework that attempted to only allow creative-works-originating software to burn HD discs, (ie, iMovie, iDVD, FinalCut and other pro apps that use full quality, large size files) therefore denying use of a program that takes a quick and dirty imported disc image and burn it to disc, so that you'd have to work around some long and annoying solution to make an illegal copy (ala burning audio CDs in iTunes and reimporting them to strip the DRM) that would deter any easy mass pirating?

More simply, I'm curious of who out there needs to burn 30 to 50 GB chunks of data, too large for a dual layer DVD to hold, and why.

 

[dr_lha]

so it's kind of a mixture here.
1. more capacity -> blu-ray
2. lower price -> hd-dvd
3. porn industry choses the cheapest format -> hd-dvd

the big thing will be the players. blu-ray players had a bad start (frames were dropped, image quality wasn't that good, delays).

it looks like blu-ray will have a hard fight.

The capacity argument was only really important for VHS vs Betamax because of the recording aspect. AFAIK there are no HD-DVD or BluRay recorders right now so essentially the capacity of the disk is meaningless to most people for Movies. Picture quality should be the deciding factor, and much like VHS vs Betamax, most people apparently can't see any real difference between BluRay and HD-DVD.

Really the only thing BluRay has on its side is the PS3.

 

[prady16]

I had already posted this on my blog a couple of months back:

Analysis of the pros and cons of Blue-ray vs HD-DVD reveals that Blue-Ray disks have higher capacity (about 50GB), are more expensive, and blue-ray players can burn disks. On the other hand HD-DVD is comparitively cheaper, little less capacity (about 40GB), but cannot be burnt by commercial players.

Hence, I belive that the cheaper HD-DVD disks would be used instead of the traditional DVDs for distributing movies, games, music and other such applications. Whereas the Blue-Ray disks would be used majorly for storing data off a computer in a home or office setting. So, in the future laptops would come equipped with Blue-Ray drives and home theater systems would come equipped with HD-DVD players.

 

[emotion]

As a consumer I'm trying as hard as possible to sit this one out.

Which isn't that hard though, let's face it.

 

[bommai]

The capacity argument was only really important for VHS vs Betamax because of the recording aspect. AFAIK there are no HD-DVD or BluRay recorders right now so essentially the capacity of the disk is meaningless to most people for Movies. Picture quality should be the deciding factor, and much like VHS vs Betamax, most people apparently can't see any real difference between BluRay and HD-DVD.

Really the only thing BluRay has on its side is the PS3.

On paper, Bluray has more support across the board but they have not come out with anything yet.

Samsung came out with the first BD player
Panasonic just came out now.
Sony will come out soon
Pioneer will come out soon
Philips - don't know.
HP, Dell, Apple, TDK, etc. are all in Bluray camp.

Fox and Disney are Bluray only
Paramount and Warner are in both camps
Universal is HD-DVD only


The only hardware vendor right now for HD-DVD is Toshiba. Even the RCA one is made by Toshiba.

So, even though BD has all this support, they cannot seem to come out with a cheap player. The movies are priced about the same. So, once the price comes down, I think it will be great. I don't agree with PS3 being the savior because I don't think most people use their game consoles to watch movies.

 

[sartinsauce]

3. porn industry choses the cheapest format -> hd-dvd

OKay, so I've heard both sides now. Can anyone say if the "pr0n industry" has chosen a format, and if so, which format have they chosen?

 

[llahsram]

Blu-ray had initially gained a lot of studio support, but recently Universal Studios has decided to drop initial support for Blu-ray.

This is false. Blu-Ray initially had less studio support. Universal never supported Blu-Ray (which the linked article states, despite the misleading headline), and Warner Brothers and Paramount only added support for Blu-Ray comparatively recently; they were initially HD-DVD only. Universal is now the only studio without Blu-Ray support.

On the other hand, Fox and Disney are still supporting only Blu-Ray (though there have been rumors of Disney looking at HD-DVD). So for the time being, it's Blu-Ray for Star Wars and Pixar fans -- assuming this is still the state of affairs when the studios release those titles...

Picture quality should be the deciding factor, and much like VHS vs Betamax, most people apparently can't see any real difference between BluRay and HD-DVD.

Given the same quality decoding hardware, for most movies they shouldn't see any difference at all. Both support the same codecs (MPEG-2, h.264, and VC-1). The first Blu-Ray discs were encoded using MPEG-2, which produced a lower quality image than the VC-1-encoded HD-DVD discs, but newer Blu-Ray discs are using VC-1 as well. The picture should be identical between the two.

The only case I could see where the capacity would affect it would be for longer movies like Lord of the Rings, where the encoded video plus lossless audio may reach the boundaries of HD-DVD. We could conceivably see more compression artifacts or the dropping of higher-resolution audio or commentaries on HD-DVD in these cases, whereas Blu-Ray would have more space. But this shouldn't affect most titles.

 

[Loge]

because this can die easily. should we buy 5 external hd's to backup the backup disk of the backup disk? no. 3 or 4 hd's i owned died since the last 10 years or so. i think it's too risky.

Whereas discs last forever, right?

 

[gkarris]

From another forum

Given the same quality decoding hardware, for most movies they shouldn't see any difference at all. Both support the same codecs (MPEG-2, h.264, and VC-1). The first Blu-Ray discs were encoded using MPEG-2, which produced a lower quality image than the VC-1-encoded HD-DVD discs, but newer Blu-Ray discs are using VC-1 as well. The picture should be identical between the two.

The only case I could see where the capacity would affect it would be for longer movies like Lord of the Rings, where the encoded video plus lossless audio may reach the boundaries of HD-DVD. We could conceivably see more compression artifacts or the dropping of higher-resolution audio or commentaries on HD-DVD in these cases, whereas Blu-Ray would have more space. But this shouldn't affect most titles.

Doesn't matter if they are now using the same codec. People's displays are messed up (component vs HDMI, version of HDMI, is the resolution REALLY 1080p?) as well as the players. As far as I'm concerned, the whole thing's messed up....

I posted this in this forum:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/236514/

"Wow, I went online to see the pros and cons of each format. When someone posts a pro/con of one system, they post the rebuttle of it on the other....

Like, I heard that Blu-Ray only has MPEG-2 right now, but it is capable of MPEG-4 and studios backing both formats will start releasing Bluray in MPEG-4 since they have to encode the movie in that for HD-DVD anyways.... what about the current Bluray titles?

I heard that Sony does have the dual layer Blurays available, and hybrid DVD/BD available also...

I saw a post of a guy online who actually hooked up his Samsung to a massive HP 60"(?) monitor that actually takes 1080p/24 scan signal (I guess a lot of TVs will take only 1080i and will upscale it to 1080p inside the TV) and he says Bluray is great! Do people actually have this sort of monitor?

Then, there's this whole 1080p/24 discs and if you want 1080p/60 Bluray has to take 1080p/24 go to 1080i/60 then to 1080p/60... what?

Then, I heard that the HD-DVD players if you have a 720p set that the player will take a 1080i disc, down it to 480p, then up it to 720p. They recommend to make the player output 1080i and have your set take it down to 720p (which my projector won't do, it just takes any signal you give it and shows that).

Wow, I'm now sooooo confused, I'm going to watch my Laserdiscs and Betamax for a while....."

 

[Willis]

so it's kind of a mixture here.
1. more capacity -> blu-ray
2. lower price -> hd-dvd
3. porn industry choses the cheapest format -> hd-dvd

Actually, the porn industry has gone with Blu-Ray.

 

[ChrisA]

That comment about not including the burner is interesting, and I'm at least trying to give it some more thoughtful consideration. Who really needs to burn 30 - 50 GB of data? For backup solutions, wouldn't just getting a huge external hard drive be more practical?

Anyone who owns a video camera and uses it will have way more then 30 to 50 GB of data. Mini DV camera make 12Gb of data per hour. If you own a DSLR and shoot in RAW format the image files are on order of 10MB each. My music colection is 50GB.

I do use a hard drive to do backups but there is a basic rule in the computer industry that data is not safe unless it exists in three copies and at two physical locations. How many 500GB hard drives do you want to own? What about photos. Peope like to think they will keep these for 50 or 90 years. You need a very robust backup system if the data are to last that long. Some of the ways data has been lost historically is by theft, fire or flood.

 

[krestfallen]

Whereas discs last forever, right?

no but the risk is marginal that a disk dies in 10 years.
of course you shouldn't play frisbee with them

 

[gkarris]

Actually, the porn industry has gone with Blu-Ray.

Where's this information?

I saw a special on 80's technologies and had Beta and VHS on there. The porn industry was really the one that finally tipped the scales (especially the rental of it).

 

[AidenShaw]

I saw a post of a guy online who actually hooked up his Samsung to a massive HP 60"(?) monitor that actually takes 1080p/24 scan signal (I guess a lot of TVs will take only 1080i and will upscale it to 1080p inside the TV) and he says Bluray is great! Do people actually have this sort of monitor?

Yes, I have the Samsung 46" LN-S4696D, connected to both a Samsung BD player and a Core 2 Duo Media Center Edition mini-tower with a Quadro FX graphics card and HD tuners.

It does 1080p native, as well as native 1920x1080 on the PC.

Some of the Blu-ray Discs are simply amazing (House of Flying Daggers is superb), although others just make the shortcomings of the original production more apparent. (Kind of like a CD of an old live concert, where the CD perfectly reproduces the hiss and noise in the master tape.)

 

[AppliedVisual]

HD DVD for movies and Blu-Ray for data. Problem solved.

Um, no....

At 30GB max on HD-DVD, even with a good VC1 transfer, 3 hour and longer features must start sacrificing quality to fit. In other words, films like "Titanic" are going to run into the same shortcomings on HD-DVD as they did with DVD.

There's other reasons to choose BluRay and this whole format war would be compltely non-existant had Sony released their product nearly a year ago when they first promised and if it had actually worked. Now they keep fumbling the ball and losing out to an inferior format at every turn.

In the end, we'll see universal players as a solution, but I doubt HD-DVD vs. BluRay will be solved before the next big format comes along. All the pieces are in place to manufacture a universal player, but Sony's Blu-Ray licensing agreements specifically forbid the inclusion of support for HD-DVD, DVD-Audio and other competing formats on the same device. It's questionable whether or not this is legal, Sony and Philips tried it with DVD+R and the exclusive licensing failed. It will only be a matter of time before someone challenges the Sony licensing. Unfortunately, the few companies already in the best position to produce a universal player (Samsung, Panasoic, LG, etc...) are already Blu-Ray allies. So it may take a bit more time.

Personally, I would rather just have digital downloads from a high speed download service and store them on my own storage whether it is on DVDs, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD as data. For large downloads, I would like to go to a local video store and download them to my laptop using Firewire 800/400 or USB but that is probably too far in the future.

Direct downloads would definitely be welcome, as long as there is the option to write them to some form of tangible media like an optical disc. There's also the issue of download times and quality. A top-notch VC1 transfer on HD-DVD or BluRay at 1080p is going to occupy 25+ GB of space. That's a significant download for any conventional broadband connection. VC1 or H.264 versions of films at near-DVD quality like we'll find in the iTunes store are OK compared to DVD and are a good start, but I think we're still just a couple years away from it really happening with HD on a broad scale. The infrastructure is being constructed now, products like iTV, iPod and yes even the Zune, will pave the way for this to happen. So we're on our way...

I think ultimately what will happen is films/videos will become entirely on-demand. Users will be able to connect directly to major studios and have on-demand access to their entire catalog of every film ever created. Sites like iTunes will still serve a purpose as a portal or gateway to access multiple catalogs from different studios all in one place with a common interface. Probably still several years off and broadband and widespread wireless access methods need to be enhanced a bit, but this is no doubt where we're headed.

 

[bilbo--baggins]

It's VHS vs. BETAMAX all over again. Hopefully this time, the superior technology will prevail.

Nope. Cheap always prevails when it comes to marketshare. The average consumer is fairly thick, when they walk along the aisles at Walmart and wonder which one to chuck in their shopping trolley the majority will go for the cheapest.

 

[AppliedVisual]

More simply, I'm curious of who out there needs to burn 30 to 50 GB chunks of data, too large for a dual layer DVD to hold, and why.

I routinely work with video files and animation frames/models/scenes that are several gigabytes in size. Our current back-up solution is an ever-evolving archive on a redundant SAN with rotating tape archives. It would sure be nice to be able to record a project onto a single disc again instead of multiple discs. Because, doing the whole multi-DVD backup of a project is a pain in the arse and I rearely mess with such a thing given the other solutions in place.

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are just another evolution of the CD / DVD / optical disc format. Just as CPU speeds and hard drive storage capacities increase, so must the capacities of other types of media.

As for yoru comment on 1080p displays... All HDTV sets are now in the progression to 1080p with most new '06 model DLP and LCOS rear projection sets now accepting and displaying full 1080p. There are currently 4 plasma displays on the market between the US and Japan that are full 1080p and several LCD models.

FWIW and I'm not trying to boast too much, I waited patiently to replace my old 36" tube set until 1080p was reality. I finally did so this July and bought the Samsung HL-S7178W - a 71" DLP TV with full 1080p and it's absolutely stunning. Did cost me $3600 on special with another coupon, but that's actually $180 less than I paid for the set it replaced when I bought it about 7 years ago.

 

[Jschultz]

Yes, I have the Samsung 46" LN-S4696D, connected to both a Samsung BD player and a Core 2 Duo Media Center Edition mini-tower with a Quadro FX graphics card and HD tuners.

It does 1080p native, as well as native 1920x1080 on the PC.

Some of the Blu-ray Discs are simply amazing (House of Flying Daggers is superb), although others just make the shortcomings of the original production more apparent. (Kind of like a CD of an old live concert, where the CD perfectly reproduces the hiss and noise in the master tape.)

If you get the chance, watch either ultraviolet, or Underworld 2 on your BD player. It looks so good, it's rediculous!