Could the death of blu-ray be upon us?

[richasr]

There arent too many advantages to make me want to change over, personally. The only way I would is if manufacturers stopped making their movies for DVD, which would either never happen or would take a hell of a long time.

Ah I just don't see the fuss, i've never been a 'buy into the hype' sort of person, I don't go with trends, I make my own mind up and at the moment HD DVDs aren't a necessity, i'd rather save up to improve my 'home cinema' system.

 

[richasr]

I don't even buy movies anymore; I just download 'em.

The beauty of it is, it isn't even illegal here. I could download a five minute old camera-pirated movie and Mr. Business would have to suck it up because I'm in Canada. File sharing is legal here. I didn't put it the internet or make it available on a file-sharing program, so I can't be held legally responsible for downloading it. It's not my fault it's there.

Now that sounds great to me, unfortunately I'm 20 and being a student in England means I'm flat broke and won't be going anywhere for some time, England is a grotty little country and everything is bad here (compared to most other places).

 

[Ydna]

I think the fact of the matter is (or was for me anyway) if you have an HD television then you need to choose at least one of them, or else you're stuck with crap unresolute picture. Sure if you're using a standard television then you couldn't care less...but if that's the case then don't bother getting either of them.

Blu-ray players don't play DVD's? I always assumed they all did since mine does. Was I wrong?

I don't think the past DVD collections matter much though. You don't have to physically REPLACE your dvd player with the new one when you buy it; your stereo/television receiver will be able to hook up both players (as long as it supports HD and has enough inputs). The fact that you have to use two players for your two disk movie formats isn't that much of an annoyance (and that's assuming your blu-ray player doesn't support DVD).
But the fact is, if you want it in HD, then you need to buy it again, it doesn't matter if you already own it...nothing you can do about that. Myself I've only re-bought two or three of my favorite DVDs in HD. And I still buy many things on standard DVD even though they're available in HD format as well.

Thoughts???

I think the funny thing is, every time there's a massive hardware advancement and the "current" hardware won't support the new stuff, there will always be griping and moaning about having to re-buy your thisandthat collection in the newest and coolest formats. When everybody buys household holo-projectors, we'll do it again. Then when everybody starts using personal neural interfaces, we'll do it again. And we'll all look back on the conversion from VHS to DVD, cassette to CD, DVD to BRD (or whatever), etc.

 

[bryan_grez]

I feel that two things need to be pointed out about file-sharing.

1: Every file-sharing program is exactly that, a file SHARING program, not a file downloading program. The instant you start a download, that particular file (even partially downloaded) is available for other users to download. So inherently, every time you download, you are making it available for upload, even if you delete immediately after.

2: The copyright laws that make downloading and uploading illegal are known as "International Copyright Laws". Therefore I'd definitely take a bet on the fact that whoever told you it was legal in Canada is blatantly full of shit, to put it nicely.

It probably is never enforced in Canada is what you mean. Which is common. For instance, marijuana is ILLEGAL in Amsterdam, but many think it is legal because it is not enforced. The difference is: don't piss the people off that have the power to enforce it.

That being said, I illegally download everything under the sun. Just pointing out some facts!

 

[soladrin]

I feel that two things need to be pointed out about file-sharing.

1: Every file-sharing program is exactly that, a file SHARING program, not a file downloading program. The instant you start a download, that particular file (even partially downloaded) is available for other users to download. So inherently, every time you download, you are making it available for upload, even if you delete immediately after.

2: The copyright laws that make downloading and uploading illegal are known as "International Copyright Laws". Therefore I'd definitely take a bet on the fact that whoever told you it was legal in Canada is blatantly full of shit, to put it nicely.

It probably is never enforced in Canada is what you mean. Which is common. For instance, marijuana is ILLEGAL in Amsterdam, but many think it is legal because it is not enforced. The difference is: don't piss the people off that have the power to enforce it.

That being said, I illegally download everything under the sun. Just pointing out some facts!

its not illegal, its under a different policy here(i'm from The Netherlands), if it was really ILLEGAL then Coffee shops couldnt exist no matter what.

 

[shadow skill]

gger one that happens to be fas

Actually, yes. I only have a certain number of hard-drive bays in my computer. When I get a bigger, faster hard-drive, I transfer over the data and dispose of the old drive (usually to the local high-school. They've got a computer refurbishing thing going on). Similarly, even though I've got a large library of VHS tapes (well.. used to) the quality and convenience of DVD meant that I've rebought nearly my entire collection on DVD now.

To rebuy that yet again in an HD format would mean I'd need to see some significant advantages to changing over.

You are proably in the minority with respect to people who buy new hard drives and dispose of the old ones. Most of the people I know who bother to do this sort of thing keep the hard drives around in some capacity whether it be in a rackmount or another machine. Personally I just convert the internal hard drive over to an external usb drive.

does it cost you extra discs to get your stuff from a smaller hard drive to a newer bigger one? no.

Completely irrelevant because it is not a requirement that you or anyone else repurchase any item.

I do agree the extra space on blu-ray is nice, but seriously, i cant be bothered to pay that much for it i doubt anyone can. and by the time blue-ray isn't this expensive anymore, dvd's will be so darn cheap you still wont buy them.

By this logic we should still be taking about VHS tapes, keep in mind that dvd rentals only first began to outpace VHS rentals in 2003 and the change from VHS to DVD was far larger. This whole rebuy collection BS has been propagated by suits who don't live on Earth; these are the same retards who think that people just throw away their old consoles in favor of the latest one that has been released, or that people really play games from the last generation on their new consoles to the point where imperfect and/or lacking backwards compatibility is a real issue.

Its as if they had not seen the sales figures for the ps2 for the last few years where it was just plain nuking all of the "next-gen" consoles.

 

[bryan_grez]

I feel that two things need to be pointed out about file-sharing.

1: Every file-sharing program is exactly that, a file SHARING program, not a file downloading program. The instant you start a download, that particular file (even partially downloaded) is available for other users to download. So inherently, every time you download, you are making it available for upload, even if you delete immediately after.

2: The copyright laws that make downloading and uploading illegal are known as "International Copyright Laws". Therefore I'd definitely take a bet on the fact that whoever told you it was legal in Canada is blatantly full of shit, to put it nicely.

It probably is never enforced in Canada is what you mean. Which is common. For instance, marijuana is ILLEGAL in Amsterdam, but many think it is legal because it is not enforced. The difference is: don't piss the people off that have the power to enforce it.

That being said, I illegally download everything under the sun. Just pointing out some facts!

its not illegal, its under a different policy here(i'm from The Netherlands), if it was really ILLEGAL then Coffee shops couldnt exist no matter what.

ok, bad reference, but my point remains the same, if not strengthened... see how easy it is to get wrong law facts!

 

[Arbre]

The people who think online is the future are the same people who believe that the web browser will supplant desktop software entirely. They are idiots, I don't know where these suits get this idea that within the next ten years or so bandwidth will increase in such a way that it will far outpace the growth of the content itself. It will never happen they need to stop dreaming of their vendor lock-in utopia. The use of NAND drives is far more likely in the near term but for the next ten or fifteen years optical media will rule the day.

I kind of agree on the download stuff and scifi bandwidth. It's not going to happen anytime soon. However, optical discs are still incredibly cheap for what you need, ROM.

Now, even the new memory cards, as far as you need to be able to read and rewrite the content at will, they're good, but still expensive. That said, they're totally uninteresting for the retail of licenced copied ROM (films, games, music, etc.).

So can we say that it's the death of Bluray? I don't think so. It may not be that of a massive technoligical upgrade though. Some people are satisfied with DVDs, while others seek higher technology.

Related to video games, there's been studios bitching about the cramped dual layer DVDs. So HD-DVD and Blueray are supports which do find sympathizers.

A question would be... do you prefer to have all your stuff on one HD support, or on multiple DVDs?

 

[shadow skill]

One other thing about NAND drives is that currently they don't last as long as current hdd technology.


With respect to the size issue in games people need to remember that even on pc most if not all games now come on a dvd. I would think that a majority of the games for pc now install just about everything to the hard drive rahtehr than stream from the disc. So even then I think there will be a gradual shift to higher capacity ROM media like HD-DVD or Blu-ray because having three and four dvds to insert during installs sucks ass. (Anyone notice how long it seems to take these games to install now? I wonder if its just me or a change in pc game compression stuff that makes my computers take longer to extract the stuff?)

 

[Copter400]

Possibly, if most people are like me. I can't tell the difference. I just can't.

 

[shaky jake]

The one thing that interested me about MS apparently sabotaging the HD vs BR wars so that movie downloads become the winner is that almost every network in the world simply wouldn't cope with 10 million plus people per country trying to download high def films instead of simply purchasing a hard copy.

The good old dot com days where they invested billions into upgrading the internet infrastructure are over and the networks are already being pushed to the limit and we haven't even begun to 'properly' or commercially tried to make downloading DVD size movies practical yet. Even the UK ISPs are pantsing themselves over the prospects of actually having to spend money and 'upgrade' our network, i imagine this would be the same for every other country who gives a damn.

The fact remains that media discs - be they HD or BR are here to stay because they are too practical to lose. The fact that Sony are pushing BR drives into their PS3s and MS are still on the bench about committing to HD says a lot. Nobody simply knowsw which way this could go for now.

I would personally like BR to win purely because of the storage adavantage but they've gotta make it competitive to win.

Rant over.

 

[Geoffrey42]

i do agree the extra space on blu-ray is nice, but seriously, i cant be bothered to pay that much for it i doubt anyone can. and by the time blue-ray isn't this expensive anymore, dvd's will be so darn cheap you still wont buy them.

By that logic, we never would've moved to DVD, because CDs are so darn cheap in comparison.

The convenience of getting everything on one disc eventually matches up to the difference in cost, and people shift up for their large data storage needs. Whether that need is content distribution or back-up, it will happen. Whether the shift is to a higher capacity optical medium or not, who knows. But DVDs will continue to get cheaper, and despite that, they will be replaced by something else.

@shadow skill & Kwil: Regarding replacing existing DVD collections, I think you both have part of it right, and neither has it all right. There is not a compelling reason to convert your entire collection of DVDs to HD format discs right now. NOR is there a necessity to upgrade your entire collection just to begin partaking in the HD formats. As Ydna mentioned, they still buy some things on DVD, even when the HD format equivalent is available, and they've even already invested in a HD format player. I think the two may co-exist for a while, and given that the majority of HD players also play DVDs (and do a damn fine job of upconversion), there's very little need to upgrade you entire current library.

@Ydna: I have a giant, 1080p TV, but I have not picked up a HD format player. I have HD service from my cable TV provider, and I have an Oppo for my DVD needs, which I am happy to deal with until a decisive victor emerges and all studios begin releasing for it, or a reasonably priced dual-format player is available, OR the price of both drops to the point where price is moot.

@shadow skill: The only reason I see PC game manufacturer's shifting to HD discs would be packaging cost reduction. Most PC games remained PC-CD until DVD players were widespread enough to ensure they weren't denying themselves any market share. And regardless of the optical format, I think most people (myself included) will opt for a full hard drive install, not because of disc swapping, but because hard drive transfer rates outclass removable media transfer rates by quite a bit right now, and probably will for the foreseeable future.

AND

@shaky jake: By "apparently" you must have meant "supposedly", or you were trying to make a funny, or you don't have a very good grasp of the English language. Take your pick.

 

[shadow skill]

@shadow skill: The only reason I see PC game manufacturer's shifting to HD discs would be packaging cost reduction. Most PC games remained PC-CD until DVD players were widespread enough to ensure they weren't denying themselves any market share. And regardless of the optical format, I think most people (myself included) will opt for a full hard drive install, not because of disc swapping, but because hard drive transfer rates outclass removable media transfer rates by quite a bit right now, and probably will for the foreseeable future.

Totally agree hard drive would be better any way you slice it, this is a given. However the manufacturers could easily ship ten or twelve cd packages they don't do it simply because its more convinient on all fronts to use dvds.

When I talk about multi-disc movies I mean phasing out three and four disc releases like the Jason Bourne collecter's edition which is four discs. The box is huge and takes up lots of space. Hell my Crest of the Stars collector's edition is four discs as well and the tin is huge....I would love to see more series end up with fewer discs in the box without the content provider having to deal with too much of a crunch.

If PC games had to use the same kind of compression that allows games to stream off the disc like they do on consoles they would have hit the wall with respect to the disc size a looonngg time ago even with the hard drive.

But I think we more or less agree.

 

[Girlysprite]

There is another reason why I prefer that my games play from my hard drive instead of a DVD- noise. My hard disk is more silent, dvd players tend to make some more sound. Such facts matter little for consoles, because mostly, you're not sitting next to them as you play while you do that with a PC.

 

[bryan_grez]

The people who think online is the future are the same people who believe that the web browser will supplant desktop software entirely.

For the sake of curiousity, I would like you to open the "My Computer" part of your OS. Now type "http://www.msn.com" into the little bar that normally would show your filepath as you browse your computer. The entire window system that runs your entire OS is the same thing as the "browser" that runs the internet. It just needed to be given it's own icon, a shifty name like "browser" and automatically have the http part added when you click the little blue e so that people could figure out how to use the internet. This is essentially the same WinMain structure that opens up when you play your favorite game. Windows (and any non-command line based OS really...) is already browser based, and was as of windows 98 and arguably windows 3.1.

Sorry to keep pointing at the flaws in everyones arguments, but I forgot to close my browser when I left work last night, so refreshed it and BAM, wrong info about computers in my face, being a programmer myself, I couln't stand to let it go.

 

[Geoffrey42]

@bryan_grez: I believe shadow skill said "web browser", and what he was talking about was the shift from desktop (local, client-side) applications towards online, web-based, server-side applications that many companies have been prophesying for a couple years. So, ummm... WTF does that have to do with your rant?

 

[shadow skill]

Thank you Geoffrey, sad thing is the guy above you probably doesn't know that you can quite easily run XP without using explorer as your graphical shell program. (No I don't mean run in command-line mode.)He probably also has not figured out that the pointless lecture he gave doesn't matter because the overwhelming amount of applications that are made for windows (That are not intended for some sort of Business use where using a web interface would actually make sense.) are not browser based by any stretch so even if I wasn't talking about everything shifting to a server based architecture, which you seemed to catch, he would still be wrong. The internet is a wonderful place.

There is another reason why I prefer that my games play from my hard drive instead of a DVD- noise. My hard disk is more silent, dvd players tend to make some more sound. Such facts matter little for consoles, because mostly, you're not sitting next to them as you play while you do that with a PC.

Girlysprite you can definetly hear the drive on a 360 (At least the first version.) the damn thing competes with my computer which is less than five feet away and is on 24/7.(The computer not the 360.)

 

[Okapi]

For myself Id give the HD disks a bigger chance. Why? Backwards compatible. From what I heard, HD players can also play normal dvd's, and a blueray can not.

This is just plain wrong. All Blu-ray players play DVDs as well.

 

[Geoffrey42]

For myself Id give the HD disks a bigger chance. Why? Backwards compatible. From what I heard, HD players can also play normal dvd's, and a blueray can not.

This is just plain wrong. All Blu-ray players play DVDs as well.

I think the source of the misinformation is that the Blu-Ray specification did not require DVD compatibility, though the Blu-Ray Disc Assocation heavily recommended it. As far as I can tell, no manufacturer has been idiotic enough to release a Blu-Ray player without the DVD compatibility. The HD-DVD specification requires it, and thus the potential that someone could've gotten confused.