I pit DVD manufacturers

The BBQ Pit
21

And this is the key. This whole HD-DVD thing is not going to work - it will play out exactly how it did for lasercisc - very few people will take them up because the “improvement” over their existing DVDs will not be enough for most consumers to be worth the expense.

I do not have an HDTV, I do not want to buy all my favourite movies again in a whole new format, I do not expect 25Gb of capacity to be utilised well, I do not care about slightly sharper images.

Unless the studios actually create the kick-assest product ever digitally assembled, I really don’t think this will play out very favourably at all.

22

Well, Airman Doors, USAF I cast my vote with dnooman and ianzin on the main reason being marketing.

My Betamax still works and when I bought it 22 years ago the two hour movies that I rented or recorded worked just fine too. The Beta format was superior. The tapes were more compact than VHS, the design of the playback assemply meant that a longer length of tape was presented to the tape head allowing more information (more picture/sound fidelity), the stereo sound track was encoded digitally onto the signal and was superior in sound quality (VHS stereo was low fidelity analog on a slow moving tape), and the equipment was sturdier than most VHS manufacturers.

Sony’s biggest blunder was their greed in not licensing the equipment rights to other manufacturers. So while VHS units were manufactured by a host of suppliers, Sony went the “Mac” route and tried to be a sole supplier. By the time they woke up to their mistake and offered licencing to others they were already in their death spiral.

One more comment about the sound quality. In the ancient times of pre-CD I used my betamax to create “mix-tapes” for my parties. I would record music into the betamax from my LPs and then run the tapes for two hours at a time. I could switch from backgound music to drunkin-frat mode with the changing of a tape and not have to worry about babysitting the music all night. I could also safely tuck away my tapes and LPs during the part and preserve them from my drunkin friends.

My Betamax DJ’d a lot of parties for me long after it’s use as a video source ended.

23

Yes, there either used to be the 2 different sized tapes on the shelf or the store had seperate sections for VHS and BETA.

24

Yep, my parents still have their Beta, and it still works just fine, and I don’t ever remember 1 hour blank tapes. My parents aren’t early adopters, and I’m certain that those 1 hour tapes existed and were a setback, but I’m also pretty certain that that was a mistake Sony would’ve rectified quickly. Marketing had a much larger impact on Beta than the length of the tapes did.

25

I didn’t mean to imply that there won’t be general release for either format but rather that the major studios are remaining neutral, contrary to the OP’s statement. Look at what Warner Bros. is doing:

Paramount and Disney are expected to take a similar route.

26

Sorry, Lute, I made a mistake quoting. I meant to quote FatBaldGuy and disagree with the claim that most studios had aligned themselves with a particular standard, but I quoted your response to him instead.

27

Happens to the best of us, eventually.

28

No, the tape length really was the thing – I remember the debate over which format to go with. My uncle was firmly in the Beta camp. For him, the appliance was mainly for watching rented movies, and the better quality image and sound was the most important thing. (Although he also used to it back up his 78s and 45s.) In our house, though, there was no question about which format to go with – because my mum wanted to record more than one soap opera during the day, and Beta simply couldn’t. (The machine we got still had the limitation that the shows had to be on the same channel, because the mechanical timer could only be set for one block of time – but Beta had that limitation as well, and only an hour time, so you could forget about trying to record a movie or a hockey game.)

This became a huge factor for many consumers, and Sony tried to react to the market, but it was too late. They introduced a crude cassette-changer, that automatically changed tapes so you could spread recordings over several tapes, but it was awkward and ridiculously expensive. They introduced LP mode to newer models, but that sacrificed the quality that they based their marketing on, and VHS immediately added LP mode to their new models, so it gave them no advantage anyway.

Early on, every video store had just as much space dedicated to Beta movies as they did for VHS – if anything, it seemed to me like there were more Beta movies. This was probably an illusion, though – because the places we went to usually organized everything by genre and alphabetically, with both formats side-by-side. I mainly remember the anguish of finding something that looked really good, but the only hint of its existence was the Beta copy sitting there. This is probably a somewhat distorted memory, though – since there was no reason to take note when a VHS copy was available but Beta was out.

It wasn’t until considerably late in the game that VHS titles were much more widely available – but this was because the format already had more market penetration and was therefore more profitable to support. By the mid-eighties you started to see less space dedicated to Beta, and a migration of existing rental copies into the discount “previously viewed” bins. I bought quite a few Beta movies at the end of its go – because they were dirt cheap and I inherited my uncle’s old Beta after he got his new-fangled front-loading VHS deck. :smiley:

29

Exactly. Remember SVHS? The delta from VHS to DVD was enormous. Chapters, widescreen, multiple soundtracks, subtitles, digital surround sound, and of course, sharper picture. DVD to HD digtal discs…a slightly even sharper picture. Wee.

30

The analogy between VHS and SVHS doesn’t really hold. There, both formats were designed for the same display device – a device that’s still yoked to 1940s technology.

The difference here is that DVDs are designed with that same display in mind, and the migration is already beginning to HDTV. Content is already available, and a 1920x1080 image isn’t “slightly sharper” than an image designed for a old-standard television – it’s hard to look at HDTV and not desire it. The situation now is like it was at the introduction of colour. The price is going to come down and won’t be long before it’s pretty much unthinkable to replace your old set with a low-res model. People aren’t going to keep buying movies on DVD when the image quality is between one third and one sixth as good as their favourite weekly shows – and movies will immediately be available in hgh definition, because they’re already shot with much higher resolution than NTSC is capable of displaying.

The idea that HDTV is a dead end is ludicrous – the improvement is huge, the industry is heavily invested in it, and given the choice, few consumers are going to settle for a shabbier picture. If anything, it’s amazing that it’s taken this long for the standard to change. HDTVs will begin outselling the old tech within a few short years, and when they do, the current DVD format will be pretty much obsolete.

31

You know, it’s possible that Airman Doors and I are both right in some respects. I’m British, and I’m writing from my own recollections of when I worked in the video industry in late 1970s and early 1980s, when mass-market domestic video took off here. At the time, I worked in video production but also knew a lot of people who worked in other areas of the emerging video industry - manufacturers, duplication plants, retailers and so on. In other words, I had a ringside seat at the VHS v Beta war, and saw it play out more or less from start to finish.

At least as far as the UK market was concerned at that time, the consensus I heard was that the VHS marketing people were quicker than Sony to realise that the key would be ‘what format is that big movie I want to rent most readily available on’, and quicker at winning that particular war and persuading the rights holders to push VHS harder than their rival.

I honestly don’t recall ‘one hour’ tapes in Beta or any other format, but maybe I’m wrong. I understood you could buy 120, 180 and 240 minute tapes in either VHS or Beta, more or less from the get go.

Maybe the story panned out differently in different markets and territories around the world. Anyway, Sony lost!

32

At the beginning (1975,) Beta tapes came in two lengths - T30 and T60. VHS was competing within a year, with T120 as the standard. Sony reacted first with kludgy mechanical tape changers, and then in 1978 they started producing a model with LP (2 hour) mode. They had already demo’d this in the Japanese market, though, and by the time it reached the North American market, it was already standard for VHS players to support LP, allowing up to four hours on a tape. Sony made another misstep by releasing some early models that were LP only – so you gave up backwards-compatibility for the extra capacity. By the time the six hour VHS tapes came out, Sony had pretty much already lost the battle for the market.

VHS always offered twice as much recording capacity – Beta’s original one-hour limitation was just plain inadequate for people who wanted to record movies, sports, or anything else that could be expected to last more than an hour, and any significant improvements they could make in that regard were easily and instantly applied to VHS models.

I think that this is the main reason that VHS originally gained ground over Beta. People who came to the market later were naturally influenced by the greater availability of movies for rental and purchase, but the initial condition that created that situation was that more consumers had already purchased VHS players and consequently rented and purchased more movies, and people stock what sells.

33

I don’t care who wins, I just want to see Ran in HD before I die. Also, I am kind of a fan of the blue laser technology, because it further poors money into the development of better and cheaper quantum dots.

34

Maybe. HDTV creates a whole new set of problems for consumers - is your set even going to work with that new high-def movie player, or are you going to be stuck watching movies in low-def because it’s incompatible with the new DRM scheme? Are you going to be able to record shows like you’ve been doing for years, or, since there’s no HDTV VCR, are you going to be stuck with the limits your cable company-issued DVR puts on your recording habits (“sorry, you can’t record anything from HBO anymore, and all your other recordings will expire 24 hours after you watch them”)? What are you gonna do when someone cracks the decryption keys used by your brand of HD-DVD player, the keys get revoked, and now none of the new movies that come out will work on your player?

IMO, they’ve really shot themselves in the foot with all these restrictions that annoy law-abiding customers (and especially the early adopters) without doing anything to stop piracy. A better picture is nice and all, but it’s not worth giving up the convenience of hooking any two pieces of equipment together and having them just work, or watching whatever you want, whenever you want, without The Man putting his foot down.

35

From this Wikipedia article on Japanese Pornography:

36

About the suitability of current DVD technology for display on HDTVs, here’s a helpful visualization.

To compare that with the improvement of SVHS over VHS, SVHS is technically 60% sharper than VHS. (400 lines of resolution vs. 240.) For most practical purposes, though, it’s not quite that much better, since cable TV is delivered to our homes at 330 lines of resolution, so if you’re recording off the TV, you’re only going to get the benefit of something like 90 additional lines of resolution. Not a spectacular improvement, and (for most people) not enough of an incentive to spring for a pricier TV with S-Video or composite inputs that would support it. The improvement was so incremental that it never caught on, and good luck finding studio-released SVHS tapes.

SVHS is half again as detailed as VHS. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are five times more detailed than DVD. Beyond that, don’t expect the special features to be exactly the same. The specs for Blu-ray, at least, allow for some neat stuff that isn’t possible with DVDs. It’s designed to be networkable, which is a neat gimmick. It uses alpha channels for more than just subtitles, so commentaries can have full-motion video composited over the film and suchlike. Not to mention that you can fit nine hours of full resolution HDTV on a single disk – or 23 hours of NTSC-quality TV, if you want to bother.

Mr2001, I’m not terribly worried about being inconvenienced by DRM issues. I’m fairly confident that things will proceed according to precedent: Security measures will be a non-issue for people who just want to watch their licensed content, and will be circumvented by people who are determined to get around it. There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the possibility of innocent consumers having their units disabled through “false positives” for piracy. I don’t see it happening, honestly. If it’s going to happen to one person, it’s going to happen to a thousand, and if it does, then it doesn’t work and will have to be reversed/abandoned. There’s no percentage in totally alienating your customers.

I’m pretty confident that I’m going to want to be able to record HDTV programming and be able to watch it any time I want, for as long as want, and I don’t see that changing any time. I’m also pretty sure that I’ll have some desire to back-up HD versions of movies, and can’t really imagine any anti-piracy features, no matter how sophisticated, are going to hold up for very long against the army of nerds that will be working 24/7 to defeat them.

Anyway, I’m sure by the time I’ve saved enough (and the price has come down) for me to start seriously considering buying an HDTV and a high-def player. When I got my first DVD player they were still impossible to make a decent copy from, but who cared? The improvement in the medium was enough that that seemed like a minor thing at the time, and the nerds worked it out anyway. Same thing here. Not really worried about it. Certainly not going to decide upfront to be content with a picture quality that pales in comparison to the new media (and is soon to become a legacy format) because the new guys aren’t leaving their pants down from the get-go.

The benefits in this case are so much greater, even if by some miracle it turns out to be a completely airtight uncrackable encryption, frankly I don’t care, so long as I can purchase and rent movies in ass-kicking high definition. I think that for the foreseeable future, at least, bandwidth limitation is the most effective foil against actual piracy. Who’s going to want to spend a week or more trying to download a twenty-five or fifty meg disc image? And if it’s re-encoded into a more digestible format, who cares, really? (I know who cares, but to my way of thinking, such a “copy” is so inadequate that it’s not a replacement for the actual product. I somtimes grab screeners of movies before they’re available, but if I have enough interest in a movie to take the time to download and burn a file that’s 1.4 or 3 gigs, you can bet your ass that I’m going to see it in the theatre or snatch up the DVD as soon as I have the opportunity to, so nobody loses anything by it.)

37

No, I’m aware of that. I was asking (and have been answered) about the length of Beta cassettes in particular, and how (if they were only an hour long) a full-length motion picture was stored on them.

38

I’m a BIG time early adopter and buy every gadget as fast as it hits the streets. With that said, HD-DVD/Bluray is the first major tech upgrade of my adult life that I don’t have ANY desire to jump into, now or in the next 5 years. I’ve got a nice collection of DVDs and they all look great on my DLP TV. My DVD player upconverts so they look real smooth. All these movies that we have right now, with the exception of some of the major digital cam shot movies, will NEVER look “HD” so why do I need an HD player? We’re NEVER going to see a HD version of any movies made before 2002 or so because the tech they were filmed with barely meets the rez of standard DVDs. They already look better on my TV than they do in the theater so why do I need more?

I’ll be VERY suprised if HD DVDs/BR become successful. I just don’t think people need, or want, what little more they bring to the table.

39

I wouldn’t say that. The size of a standard DVD frame is 720x480 pixels, but when scanning film, you can get details up to 2400 dpi or more, for a theoretical frame size of 2100x1500 or higher for 35mm movies.

40

I think you should prepare to be surprised, then :). The display technology really isn’t fundamentally that much more expensive than the old technology - after all, we’ve been producing HD and higher res monitors for ages; display units have been waiting for transmission standards to catch up. Both of the major next-gen games consoles* are ground-up HD devices which people will want to get the most out of, and assuming sales are similar to the last generation, that represents more than 150 million units (and oh my goodness does HD ever make a difference to games). I think you’re very much mistaken to say that DVD represents better resolution than proper 70mm film stock, and even if this were the case, pure resolution is not the whole story when talking about film transfers; compression levels and blocking make a large difference as well, particularly to pacy movies. You’ve also got to remember that DVD took several years to successfully launch, and that people said much the same thing about those as you’re saying now about HDTV. These things take time. I think your five years is a fairly reasonable timeframe for one of the HD standards to take over.

Personally, I knew it would rule the world when out shopping with my mother, possibly the least techy-joy type person in the world. We happened to wander past a shop with the first HDTV we’d seen in the window, and she was so taken with the difference that we ended up standing there watching the whole demo video run through twice. And it was only wildlife clips as well. I really think you’re underestimating just how much of a difference it makes. Perhaps not if you’ve already got a DLP home-projection unit and all that, but for most people it’s going to be like night and day.

I’d rather they actually competed and let us decide. Everyone goes on about the horror of “format wars”, but why is it better for us to have some committee decide what’s ideal based on their own commercial considerations, rather than have companies offer us their solutions, and have us pick the best? I don’t know that there is a definitive answer to the HD-DVD/BR pros and cons, and would like both to make it to market so we can see for ourselves. Do you find it frustrating that McDonald’s and Burger King can’t get together and decided whose burger is best, and just make that?

*Don’t kill me, Nintendo fans.