As far as I can tell, the studios have a major incentive to settle on a single format, and despite the cries of "the war is over" I don't think we're there yet. As long as this continues, people are going to stick with standard def, and as long a people stick with standard def the torrents are going to be a tempting option.
HD is what will buy the studios some refuge from illegal downloads. Right now, there's little penalty for downloading a movie-- it's not unreasonable to download a few GB. Downloading and storing 50GB is a chore and people will be more likely to buy the physical media. As long as they bicker back and forth over trivially different formats, they're bleeding revenue.
Question to the people who follow this most closely: is there any risk that Europe goes one way and the US goes a different way? NTSC v PAL, region encoding and the rest have been a royal pain-- I'd hope we finally just agree that the differences aren't worth the hassle...
What are you trying to say? Except for Toshiba, all of the CE's support Blu-ray either exclusively or non-exclusively and all studios except Universal and Paramount/Dreamworks support Blu-ray exclusively.
We already have one format and that is Blu-ray.
Looks to me like 30-40% of available titles are HD-DVD. Doesn't sound like one format to me...
They have. Blu-ray has been consistently outselling HD-DVD of the same titles. 300 BR outsold HD-DVD like 3-1 or something, and that's why Warner is now BR exclusive.
Up-conversion is pretty much a marketing gimmick to get you to spend more on a dvd player. You can't replace resolution and picture information that's not already there.
Agreed on the second point, but using 300 as a reference seems a bit suspect to me... 300 strikes me as the kind of movie that every single PS3 owner would buy-- it just fits the demographic.
So kind of a crazy question (but a good one I think)...
Say that Toshiba ends up striking some sort of deal with Blu-Ray. I know that right now the two formats are not compatible. Is this some sort of PHYSICAL incompatibility or it is some sort of firmware incompatibility? Is it possible that if a deal were struck that current HD-DVD players could eventually read Blu-Ray DVDs as well with a simple update?
Not a crazy question. I don't think it would be a simple firmware update, but combo players would become much cheaper. I think the major expense in the dual format players is licensing-- that would fall away once one party or the other capitulated. Both sides would have an interest in minimizing the pain after a victor is declared-- lest the next format war leave people even more hesitant to buy.
I'm glad about this - good to see the best format win.. I mean that from an archival and "what I'd like to see replacing DVD-R" perspective... As well as a home entertainment one.
Also region coding isnt a huge issue sofar on BD, a lot (certainly all of the BDs I have) don't even have it enabled.
So you actually bought the same movies for both formats? That's the only way you'd have a valid comparison. BD supports the same codecs as HD-DVD, it was only to begin with that it used mpg2, they both use h.264 now.
To all extents and purposes there's no reason for them not to look identical.
Latent "features" leave me more wary than active features. If region encoding is possible but not used, that just means that nobody wants to tarnish the format by employing it-- once the format war is over, you can expect this little nuisance to be used widely.
I've seen the "BD/HD-DVD is superior" and the "both formats are essentially the same" arguments given back and forth through the thread, but this is the first post I've seen to use both arguments essentially side by side...
