I haven’t been following this very closely, obviously. Are (n)either of these backwardly compatible - can they play previously released non-HD DVDs?
Yeah, they both upconvert standard DVDs via HDMI. I personally use an Oppo DV-981HD for that though, since it does a better job.
They can, but still to see the benefits of an HD player and an HDTV, you need HD content. There are DVD players that ‘upconvert’, but as far as I’m aware (I could be wrong) they only apply a sharpening filter, which for bad-quality DVDs will make things look worse instead of better. At any rate, while you can improve the quality of a non-HD image, you’re not going to get it up to HD quality.
(I’m really not a fan of the idea of ‘upconverting’. I know enough about cleaning up video to know that you can’t treat all DVDs equally. What improves one may make another look like crap.)
(But lord, if I could get a HD version of Transformers…drools)
That’s not quite true. From what I’ve read on various home theatre and digital video forums, the upconverting algorithms are a lot more complicated than that. Of course, each manufacturer has their own special recipe, some better than others, so it would be a good idea to compare and contrast the performance of various upconverting players.
This is true, to an extent. In my case, in addition to my BR player, I also have a home theatre PC with which I use ffdshow to apply a variety of re-sizing, de-interlacing, noise reducing, deblocking, and sharpening filters on my DVDs which I can then tweak on a disc by disc basis. This level of geekery will obviously yield the absolute best results but even a low to mid-range upconverting player will look better than standard resolution on an HD display. At least in my experience.
Of course, nothing the beats the stunning clarity of full HD video.
Wait, are these being applied while the DVDs are playing? If so, I’d like to know what kind of rig you have to get them playing at anywhere near a normal speed. If not…I’ve thought about doing similar, but frankly I’m too lazy 
For the technologically impaired: If upconversion could potentially be a dicey proposition for standard DVDs, will I have the option to send them to a HD display with no conversion whatsoever - to see them just as I’m watching them now on an analog TV? I know that it isn’t the same as watching a HD version of the same movie, but I’ve been watching them without all this time without complaint.
I got an upconverting DVD player for Christmas and I have to say I’m thoroughly impressed by the results. I’ve watched a variety of discs so far and seeing Die Hard and Children of Men in “pseudo-HD” is good enough for me. I’ll make the jump to HD when I have to.
Although I’m sure my TV, a 27" HDTV, doesn’t need as good a picture to look impressive as a larger TV.
Most upconverting DVD players I’ve seen require an HDMI connection for the upconverting. If you just hook the player up to a composite or component input, you’ll get the same non-upconverted signal you’re used to.
I need one of these. I’ve been using the regular controller and it is a pain in the ass. Can you turn the PS3 off with the remote?
Your post about covers it. Some people have mentioned buying the movie remote separately; I think it’s pretty bullshit that you should have to do that.
Frankly, I’d rather the console makers stop putting movie players in the boxes anyway. I might have bought a PS3 if not for the included Blu-Ray driving the price up. Maybe for some of you that’s a selling point, but I know a lot of gamers who agree with me.
The general feeling here in Australia is “No-one gives a shit”, with a slight edge to Blu-Ray because that’s what the PS3 supports.
Both formats are freaking expensive and require an LCD TV, of which there aren’t as many in people’s homes as retailers would like you to think. Most here people are still using CRT TVs, so it’s a complete WOFTAM* to go and buy a HD/Blu-Ray player when all you’ve got in the lounge is a Chinese-made 32" CRT that you got from RetraVision a few years back when they had that sale on.
My personal feeling is that either dual-format players will become de rigueur and that the differences between the two formats will cease to matter to anyone except Videophiles and the sort of people who buy AV cables with connectors made of gold used on the Space Shuttle because it reduces solar electro-harmonic interference in their equipment**, or that a third format will come out and turn BR/HD-DVD into the early 21st century equivalent of the 8-track, the LaserDisc, or the MiniDisc.
Remember, there are people out there who still haven’t purchased even a standard-def DVD player; and these are things you can get for $35 from K-Mart. It will take a long, long time to supplant all the SD DVDs out there, and while backwards compatibility on the part of the HD/BR players will help, there’s still a sizeable percentage of people out there (including myself) who are looking at the new formats and saying “This offers no particular practical advantage over what I have now, why should I change?”
FWIW, this is one of the reasons Digital TV has been such a non-starter here in Australia. Digital Set Top Boxes have been available for years at reasonable prices- and they offer a noticeable improvement over analogue TV, even on a CRT telly- but the uptake rate is still only something like 30% nation-wide. Just to make things more complicated, they’re bringing out some new HD-only TV channels, just to piss off all the people who went and got SD boxes back when HD boxes still cost $400 (which was basically until a few months ago). It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out eventually…
*Waste of fucking time and money, for those of you outside Australasia
**Or something else equally tedious and wanky
Im in the choose neither camp.
As an owner of serval hundred DVD titles and not once thought “gee, if only I could watch this movie with a little extra picture detail”, neither do I buy the whole “but TV’s are getting bigger, so you will need HD to avoid a bad picture” this might be the case, however my house is not getting bigger so Im not likely to buy a 42" TV or a projector.
My parents have Sky HD and as promised the picture does look better, but we dont need it, its just so they can say they had before their friends and family.
Does anyone have the figures for how the DVD is selling against HD DVD and Blu Ray ?
I imagine that it is still a country mile ahead in terms of sales, all the studios I can think of are still producing their films on DVD. I can not see any studios cutting their DVD production to push either next gen format. At least not until the DVD sales start to drop, if they ever do.
I will continue to back the winner. The DVD.
These filters are applied during realtime. My system is WinXPSP2 with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz processor with 2 Gigs of RAM. Fairly powerful, but nowhere near bleeding edge. I’ve found I can apply anywhere from 4 to 6 separate filters through ffdshow before I take a noticeable performance hit and start getting dropped frames.
If you want to read up more on this topic, I highly recommend AVS Forum. It’s kinda like the Dope for Audio/Video enthusiasts.
Great question. Let me put on my Captain Google pants for a second…
Blu-ray & HD DVD Sales: Pitiful
Transformers Transform HD-DVD Sales Figures
So Transformers didn’t just move more standard DVDs in 2007 than all HD discs combined; it doubled the year volume in a single month.
Already here. If not commercially available yet…
That article is from March of 2006. Has anything more come of the VMD format?
It appears i have not chosen wisely. I have the Xbox HDDVD player. Over the last 8 months or so i have bought exactly 55 hddvds. I was trying to win this war single handedly apparently. I just hate Sony that’s all.
I have both. I picked up a Toshiba HD-DVD player from Wal-Mart back a couple months ago when they were $97, then bought a 40GB PlayStation 3 around Thanksgiving. If HD-DVD dies, I only paid $100 for it and I stll can use all my HD-DVD titles. If Blu-Ray dies, at least I still have a PS3…
That looks cool. There are so many cool technologies we’re already working on like the Holographic Versitile Disc. Blu-Ray is to DVD what S-VHS is to VHS. Ho-hum. I just don’t see buying a hardcopy of anything for much longer. Download it, stream it, store it on a huge storage medium.
Apparently not that much. Here’s a more recent article from Fall '07
According to the article:
That was from September. A search for “VMD player” on Radio Shack’s site and Costco’s yielded zero results. Amazon has an entry that says that they don’t know “when or if” it will be in stock. Looks like it was dead before it even hit the stores.
If I had a nickel for every revolutionary, inexpensive, high-capacity, new data storage medium I’ve read an article about, but that never sees the light of day… well, I guess I’d have enough to buy a Blu-Ray player. 