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Toshiba To Stop HD DVD Player Production

mcarnes said:
True, and it's a real problem, imo. I love Apple, but quality has really taken a hit because of them. iTunes is the reason SACD failed, and blu-ray won't be developed nearly to the point it would have if movie downloads take off. It's a weird irony, because Apple always meant quality, at least to me.
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iTunes was NOT the reason SACD failed. MP3's and downloading were already big before iTunes. The iTunes Music Store was launched 4 years after the introduction of SACD, and then it was Mac only for a time.

Besides MP3's, SACD failed because most people didn't want to replace CD's and buy new CD players (the quality wasn't that much better to the average joe with an inexpensive system). On top of that, there was a competing format, DVD-Audio. Sound familiar? Kind of like how many people (even folks with HDTV's) don't really care to replace their DVD players, and were confused by two competing HD formats.

In any case, I'm happy that Blu-Ray won. Still a bit expensive for me, but now prices will go down quicker!
 
LaDirection said:
Why did you wish the inferior format to win??
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He said he wanted *HD DVD* to win, not BluRay. :rolleyes: While its a big shame that HD DVD didn't win since it really is a better format imo, its good that one has come out victorious. I just wonder how long it'll take for all the HD DVD only titles to become available on BluRay. I'm still glad I've been dual format for a good while now. I have noticed recently that BluRay is getting easier to get hold of than HD DVD in terms of bargains, 3 for 2 offers etc.
 
Big-TDI-Guy said:
Long way off? I differ on that thought. It'd be here today, as we have the capacity to do so...
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You can't have it both ways. Look at this thread... La Porta says "capacity is everything to me". If HD-DVDs 35GB is insufficient then we're clearly a long, long way off from realistic downloadable content. The only way iTMS can claim HD content is by scaling back to 720p and compressing the ever living crap out of the content. The quality just isn't there.

Consumer broadband isn't even remotely close to being able to sustain 30-50GB movie downloads. The quality difference is tangible and driving HD adoption. You're just not going to get that over the wire any time soon.
 
La Porta said:
Why are region codes so bad? Prices always drop so price is never really an issue. More capacity is everything for me at this point.
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Region codes are bad because why the **** should we have to wait two to three months to pay twice the amount for a film that is in the same language, packaging etc. It doesn't cost that much to translate a film from "American" to English after all!

I have more HD DVDs in my collection because they're region free and buy many of them via Import. Bluray is *significantly* more expensive in terms of films and players, even when you get blurays as part of 3-for-2 deals here in the UK.
 
La Porta said:
Why are region codes so bad? Prices always drop so price is never really an issue. More capacity is everything for me at this point.
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You obviously don't live in one of the second class countries where films take forever to appear discs for our region and cost a flipping fortune compared with the US. Worse, the quality of transfers is often sub-par and they may even miss out extras and so forth. I have always bought multi-standard kit because the US releases were released earlier and were cheaper and better.

Lacking region codes was the best part of HD DVD as I have bought loads of films from the US. To do the same with BD I will have to import a US PS3 or standalone Region A BD player. Stupid extra expense but to be tied to Region B releases is unacceptable and the region free BD players I have seen were horrendously over priced and likely to be rendered useless by a firmware update in the future. Why BD had to have region codes is beyond me.
 
Foot in my mouth to a degree about the region thing. That comes from never having to actually worry about it :rolleyes:.

As for the capacity, I say it's everything because I'm not even thinking about movies. HD movies will fit on both. The day that we get BR-R and BR-RW drives in our Macs is what I'm talking about. In that respect, the actual physical media will be in our favor because by that time prices will have dropped anyway, and we will have more room to work with.
 
GreatDrok said:
Why BD had to have region codes is beyond me.
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Due to a money grabbing company named S*** and a couple of money grabbing film studios. The rest don't care.

La Porta said:
Foot in my mouth to a degree about the region thing. That comes from never having to actually worry about it :rolleyes:.

As for the capacity, I say it's everything because I'm not even thinking about movies. HD movies will fit on both. The day that we get BR-R and BR-RW drives in our Macs is what I'm talking about. In that respect, the actual physical media will be in our favor because by that time prices will have dropped anyway, and we will have more room to work with.
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I really don't think BR-R and BR-RW is going to catch on in the computer market. The only thing people need that much storage for (most of the time) is video and most people will not be dealing (personally) with that much video. For large backups, data transfers etc, external HDs have become so cheap these days and easy to use that they're a no brainer. How many applications need that much space? No games use that much, no PS3 games even use that much space. A DVD or two is more than enough space and a teeny fraction of the price of a bluray disk and it will remain that way for a long time.
 
La Porta said:
Foot in my mouth to a degree about the region thing. That comes from never having to actually worry about it :rolleyes:.

As for the capacity, I say it's everything because I'm not even thinking about movies. HD movies will fit on both. The day that we get BR-R and BR-RW drives in our Macs is what I'm talking about. In that respect, the actual physical media will be in our favor because by that time prices will have dropped anyway, and we will have more room to work with.
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I gave up on burning discs a long time ago. I have superdrives in most of my Macs and rarely use them. The capacity of a DVD, even a dual layer one, is a fraction of what I have on my drives. HD DVD and BD aren't enough of an improvement compared with the size of drives which have increased in capacity far more since 1998 when DVDs started to get popular. Heck, in 1998 my laptop had a 3GB drive in it and that was big. Today I have a 100GB drive in my MBP. You're better off sticking a 2.5" drive in a Firewire case for moving big chunks of data about and for backup I just mirror onto a second drive.

The difference in capacity between HD DVD and BD is neither here nor there because neither is big enough for anything more than entertainment.
 
Spanky Deluxe said:
I really don't think BR-R and BR-RW is going to catch on in the computer market. The only thing people need that much storage for (most of the time) is video and most people will not be dealing (personally) with that much video. For large backups, data transfers etc, external HDs have become so cheap these days and easy to use that they're a no brainer. How many applications need that much space? No games use that much, no PS3 games even use that much space. A DVD or two is more than enough space and a teeny fraction of the price of a bluray disk and it will remain that way for a long time.
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I agree with what you say, but discs have always been key for backup simply because they are inert, and don't have motor-driven platters, read/write heads, etc. that can fail. As for the storage...at least 15 years ago, you were hard pressed to fill up a CD (let alone DVD) with everything on your computer. Things catch up.
 
HD DVD is dead and has been since Warner decided to go with Blu-ray. Any companies still hanging around supporting them are pretty much wasting their time and money. I am guessing that all the delusional companies still with HD DVD will make the switch by July or August.
 
Let the bitching from the people that bought HDDVD players begin.

It's your own fault for not waiting.
 
La Porta said:
I agree with what you say, but discs have always been key for backup simply because they are inert, and don't have motor-driven platters, read/write heads, etc. that can fail. As for the storage...at least 15 years ago, you were hard pressed to fill up a CD (let alone DVD) with everything on your computer. Things catch up.
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I really don't think Blu-rays hold enough space to be of value. Who is going to backup to Blu-rays? I'm certainly not. I've got 2TB of data on this machine here, no way would I do that. For sure, nearly all of that data isn't all that important. I could, in theory, back up all my vital data to Blu-rays but switching disks and using backup software etc is so clumsy these days and hard to use. Why would I want to spend ~£300 on a Blu-Ray recorder for backup that can write 25GB disks at ~£8 a pop when I could buy a 1TB Apple Time Capsule for £329 and have OS X seamlessly backup all my data to a secure place somewhere in my home.
The only people I can see who would find Blu-Ray to be of use to them would be 1) Some professionals that regularly need to send ~20gb of data to people and for whom all the other people in the industry have Blu-Ray readers, 2) People who want to rip and copy Blu-Ray disks and 3) People that want to watch Blu-Rays on their computers. The last one would only need a reader, number two would only need a reader for most people (since they'd compress it to a size that'd fit on a DVD) leaving only the first one. Not exactly a massive target audience.

Edit: Also don't think that just because optical disks have no moving parts that they don't degrade. Home-burnt optical disks have about a 5 year shelf life before they literally start to fall apart. :-S
 
bdkennedy1 said:
Let the bitching from the people that bought HDDVD players begin.

It's your own fault for not waiting.
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And for not listening. When the "war" started the majority of "technology experts" I read from, predict Blu-ray would win the war. The addition of Blu-ray to PS3 made me believe that there was already a slim, slim shot for HD DVD.
 
tk421 said:
I think that was his point. If HD-DVD is dead, surely they'll move Matrix to Blu-ray?
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They probably will although it could take a while. If Toshiba is actually going to stop production then HD DVD players are going to cost peanuts. They'll probably still carry on with the 5 free HD DVDs deal too.

Other big news titles that will need to get re-released on Bluray (and which will probably take ages to switch over) include Transformers and Star Trek Remastered.

Edit: It will definitely take a while. For one, all the extra features and menus etc will (well, should) have to be recreated in Blu-Ray Java - one of the big reason why the people that make the disks (not the film studios, the little guys working on creating menus etc) dislike Blu-Ray so much. I wouldn't expect these films to be released on BluRay for at least 6-12 months.
 
Edit: Also don't think that just because optical disks have no moving parts that they don't degrade. Home-burnt optical disks have about a 5 year shelf life before they literally start to fall apart. :-S[/QUOTE]

Perhaps in lab tests....I've got stuff friends burned for me 10 years ago still working. Not to mention all of those 3.5 and 5 1/4th floppies that should have all lost their magnetic charge by now.

Safe to say, we all have different priorities for why we want the formats, and what we will get from them.
 
bdkennedy1 said:
Let the bitching from the people that bought HDDVD players begin.

It's your own fault for not waiting.
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I disagree. First, read GreatDrok's post above about how region B movies and players are overpriced. With that in mind, consider that my HD DVD player and 18 discs still cost less than a BR player on its own. I don't think I made a bad decision at all.
 
I am excited about getting a BD-RW drive when the price drops a little more. I currently backup all my critical data onto about 10DL DVD's every month or so, and it will be so much easier and much more compact to just burn 2 50GB BD disks.

Even though I back everything up to my home server nightly, I still feel that it's good to keep an optical backup in the gun safe in case of a fire or whatnot.
 
What Will Happen to Current Hardware?

I'm wondering what effect this will have on the resale value of current hardware. Mac hardware generally retain a good resale/used value over time, except when there are major revisions affecting multiple products--the Intel switch e.g.

Thoughts?
 
CalmEnvy said:
Finally, the format war is over. Although I'm a Blu-Ray fan (have 26 movies so far, have had my PS3 for 3 months).
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I'm pretty happy as well. I haven't bought a single DVD or HD disc since it began and now I can start my collection of HD movies. I don't know how many people waited like I did, but it's been a while and I certainly wasn't going to waste my money on the old format.

Now I can purchase a blu-ray player and an HD preprocessor. Just bought and HDTV, so good timing. :D
 
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