How is it a pain in the ass? Aside from maybe a little awkward using a controller instead of a remote. But at our place, the PS2 was the preferred DVD player until it broke–the DVD/VCR is missing its remote, and we don’t have a remotely good setup for watching on the computers.
I’m still kinda hoping that HD-DVD wins out, if only as another incentive to get a 360 over a PS3 (Soul Calibur IV isn’t coming out on the Wii, dammit). I’m trying to push my husband towards HDTV (I’m an eye candy junkie, what can I say?) and if we could have a console double as a HD player, that would make the transition easier.
Really. Why should I have to replace perfectly good equipment and media every 5 or 10 years? Once everyone has Blu-Ray (or whatever) then they’ll come along with something else, to make you repurchase everything again.
I have a standalone player for each format. The Toshiba HD-A30 for HD-DVD and the DMP-BD30 for Blu-ray. I am disappointed that Blu-ray appears to have won, since this means that half of my collections will be obsolete. But I am still enjoying my Matrix trilogy tremendously - only available on HD-DVD.
I just won a HD TV over the holidays at my group holiday party. The basic cable package I have gets a few HD feeds. They are much better that normal TV. When the Cable industry gets off of their greedy asses and agrees upon a delivery standard instead of their half assed, expensive support of cable cards so people can use TVs without set top boxes HD will take over rapidly. HD is a lot better than regular TV but regular TV is pretty decent and the majority of people are not ready to spend the extra money and go thorugh the hassles of set to boxes that the providers want so HD is languishing. It is a lot like the internet when you paid by the minute few people bought it but when AOL went to fixed price people snapped it up. HD will take off when the providers are convinced they can make more money on volume rather than gouging.
Warner’s decision may or may not be important – I’m not accepting spin from Warner or ComingSoon.net. I think we’ve been seeing a lot of this give and take in the last few months from the studios.
For me, I’ll do what I was going to already do: buy the cheapest possible player of either of the new formats, and then rent movies in that format, and not buy any media at all. I expect my HD player may be a throwaway in 12 months. If I spent <$200 (or especially <$150), fine, I got my money out of it, and the studios got almost nothing from me.
I expect many consumers may do the same. The studios will get zip in revenues (no media sales from HD movies) until this argument is completed. A pox on all of them.
I’m quite satisfied with my April 2007 choice to buy a PS3. While I will buy a 360 from the surplus of my tax-free January paycheck, it will be used singularly to play games. I’m not a fanboy, so I can and will easily give the 360 a long edge on quality games, even with MGS:4 and FFXIII thrown into the mix.
Time Warner’s decision to go all-BR has consolidated my choice of HD format, and I suppose all my future hardcopy movie purchases will be BR. A good friend of mine has already converted most of his DVD collection into a mix of BR and HD, and while I can see only a negligible contrast between the two HD formats’ quality, I will give the edge to Blu-Ray.
(Also, I simply can’t wait until Warner works out the BR Java and PIP issues and get The Matrix on Blu-Ray, damnit!)
Is there any actual difference in the TV picture between blu ray and HD-DVD? I was under the impression that they both used the same set of video codecs (VC-1 or H.264 for things actually released) and the difference was only a physical media format difference but the actual data bits of interest were the same.
I have to apologize for expressing myself unclearly; I was mostly thinking of the BR films having more bonus content and larger potential storage space. As far as I know, both formats use the MPEG 4-AVC/H.264 codec and as such any visual difference will be down to the quality of the original, the quality of the scan and, I suppose, the compression size limit. I’m not anything remotely like a techie and I wasn’t trying to say that the BR has superior picture quality to the HD-DVD.
It’s an interesting question, though, and one I’d like an answer to. As far as I know, the current maximum sizes (BR double-layer and HD-DVD triple-layer) are the same. (Though, notably, no movies have been or are scheduled to be released on a triple-layer HD-DVD yet, to the extent of my knowledge)
Theoretically, though, the BR’s Quad-layer disk may contain a movie’s worth of Cinema 4K quality picture, which would be a wonder to behold.
I’m still firmly in the “wait and see, and not really very excited about either” camp.
I’m less interested in the movie issues (moot since I don’t have an HDTV and probably won’t for several years (the set I have now is big enough, works fine and does everything I want)) than in data storage. Having an HD-DVD or BD reader/writer for my PC would be very useful.
My wife gave me an HD-DVD for my birthday, completely unaware of any difference between the two standards. She simply saw “HD” and bought the thing. I think Blu-Ray will win out if for no other reason than my possessing said machine. Nevertheless, it is not entirely useless because it plays standard DVDs with a tremendously improved picture. So we’re okay for now.
I’m not sturmhauke, but I agree with him. Yeah, it is awkward. It sucks not having a button on the remote for every function. And, at least from playing a couple of regular DVDs on my 360, it sucks having options that are just little symbols with no words to explain what they do. That works fine for skipping chapters or whatever, but what the hell does a title menu look like in button form? Also, when you pause then unpause or use any of the options at all, the display stays up on the screen for a good minute with no clear way to remove it other than to wait it out. Yeah, those are little things, but they add up.
Also, I don’t like to “waste” a console on movies. That DVD drive has a limited lifetime and I want it all to go towards games. Granted, with the HD players still so expensive, it doesn’t really make a difference now, but it sure did when PS2s were $200 and prone to drive failure at the same time that set-top DVD players were flying off the shelves at $35-40.
Interesting… I’ve been sitting out the format war due to fear of obsolescence, but the last time I read up on it in this article from about 2 years ago, HD-DVD had the lead in three critical areas: entry price of the player, availability of movie titles, and most importantly (and somewhat surprisingly), the picture quality!
The review I linked to above was done using an HD projector very similar to the one I have for my home theater, and was rather scathing in its verdict on Blu-Ray: in a direct three-way comparison of the same movie played from a standard format DVD (upscaled to 720p – using the same DVD player I have), an HD-DVD and a BD disc, the BD disc had only marginally better picture quality than the DVD.
I’ve read elsewhere that this was due to the “first wave” of Blu-Ray discs using an inferior codec (MPEG-2), and that the Blu-Ray camp eventually moved to VC-1 encoding, which closed the PQ gap with HD-DVD. This second article was written about 9 months after the other one.
So, if Blu-Ray is now the front-runner and likely “winner” in the format war, I might bother to invest in a Blu-Ray player. What I can’t seem to find out though is if the earlier set of “first wave” discs have been re-released with the new codec. In either case, how can I tell what codec was used for a given disc? It would suck if some significant percentage of currently available BD discs had “barely better than SD-DVD” picture quality… And it would doubly suck if these titles were also available in a new printing with higher quality, but I couldn’t tell the difference from the packaging!
I fee,l like many other posters, that this entire debate is going to be all for naught. See, there will be a third technology and it will probably be as expensive to produce, if not cheaper and it’ll hold more. Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD is going to be a video game console only argument very soon, I believe.
I don’t get why anyone would want to be an early adopter of this technology and get a player that only plays one kind or another. That’s illogical.
Remember the audio wars?
LPs were the only thing the audiophile would touch, cassettes were just evil (to the audiophile) but oh so convenient and were embraced by the masses. CD won over the masses (but not the hardcore audiophile who were still sitting on their LPs). DVD audio was trying to make noise (pun intended) but seemingly only won over the hardcore audiophile crowd while being thoroughly ignored by the masses.
To insult the audiophiles even more, the masses have largely abandoned the CD format to go to the lower quality online download. Personally, I never got into the DVD audio craze and only listen to CDs when I am in my wife’s car with a CD changer. I realize that while my iPod may not have the quality (and while I could raise the quality level I don’t have the desire) that other formats deliver, it is just fine with me.
Moving this to video:
I have a fair sized (~100) DVD library, about 50 old VHS cassettes that still get occasional airplay and all this is played on a 15 year old 27” TV. My next upgrade (as soon as I get the basement bathroom finished) is to get an HD TV and a good sound system. At that time I still don’t see myself buying into an HD format.
I may convert someday to the winner of BR/HD but see no need to jump now when prices and uncertainty are still high. I personally think there will be a single winner but I also feel that this would be the last quality jump that would be embraced by the masses. Eventually I think we will move to some sort of download format which may well be lower quality that HD or Blue Ray.
I sat on the sidelines for about a year, despite my best frind who is a VERY early adopter having bought a Blu-ray player and touting it. I also expected a combo player to emerge, but so far it doesn’t appear that a cost effective one has.
We bought a PS3 primarily as a BD player as well, and only recently have pleasently “discovered” playing games on it. My wife and I have not been into the console games before (well, excluding Atari 2600 & intellivision) and have enjoyed playing the new offerings.
Overall, with the addition of the 25$ PS3 movie remote we bought, we are very happy w/ the choice.
Same here. Being able to store 25+GB of data at a time on a single disc would be wonderful. As it is, for me to back up a single photographic session on DVDs takes 5-6 DVDs, so I don’t bother–just use external hard drives and a RAID. But if I could put each job on a single disc, I’d start doing it.
I chose to go neutral and have access to exclusive content on both sides…so yeah, I think I chose wisely. Did I choose the option best for my wallet? No…no I didn’t.
