So now that HD-DVD is dead

[PettingZOOPONY]

Ah I see now. I don't think there will ever be a clear victor. I DL all my games for PC now and the same for all my HD movies. And with SSD( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_disk ) getting on the market and the cost of external HD as cheap as they are I just see no reason to make back ups with optical discs.

But if these companies were smart and offered me a huge discount(I'm talking 80% off) on titles that I already own then I would actually get one of these players. But as of now why bother since most movies I have were not shot in a HD format to begin with.

Now that I think about it whoever the porn industry chooses will help also, that was one of the bigger deciding factors in the Beta Vhs war.

 

[Fire Daemon]

Something tells me this is a thread atempting to bring out the 360 fans into an argument with the PS3 fans.

 

[zardosbacon66]

I never really understand why their are two high-end disk formats.

VHS to DVD, which was pretty streamline. Then, all of a sudden, two formats pop up. It Just seems stupid to me.

 

[PurpleRain]

I hope they don't kick off and replace all the DVD's. Three reasons: 1)I don't particularly want to go out and buy a whole brand new thing, that works fine for me. 2) I don't own (and I'm sure many people are the same) a HD tv, and same with point one, am not going out of my way to buy one when my current is just fine. 3) What's going to happen to all my DVD's? I don't want to have to replace them all again and loose an amount of cash.

So, I hope they don't get off. I hope they crash. I hope they burn in hell!

 

[Thegreatoz]

its not much of a difference to me so i doubt I would ever get a blu-ray....that is ofcourse untill DvDs become obsolete and no one makes them anymore and I can buy a blu-ray player for 9.95$ at the local Wal*Mart.

 

[CyberAkuma]

I like how Sony fanboys claim that HD-DVD isdead and how that someone would be equal to that BlueRay would be the new standard for discs.

It seems pretty forgettable for them to realize that all other consoles and PCs use DVD.
The PS3 is the *ONLY* console that uses BlueRay - all other consoles uses regular DVD9 and they're doing great.

And on top of that, nearly 90% of all PS3 games released so far are under 9 GB in size.

BlueRay hasn't "won" the format war by a longshot and it most likely never will unless it drops its price below the DVD discs.
People aren't stupid and they aren't willing to pay that much for something they cannot see a significant quality-change.

To claim that the PC would soon see BlueRay titles is rediculous and laughable.
PCs have the ability to use serveral install discs since all the data is installed to the harddrive - something consoles can't do. So there is no need for a bigger disc media. PC are doing fine without BlueRay and they will be fine with it for generations to come.

Not to even mention that 99.9999999999% of all PC titles are under DVD5 in size.
Upscaling works different on PCs compared to consoles, so we don't need to load up the discs with giant textures unlike what consoles do.
And don't get me started on that 1080p argument crap. There's barely a handful of PS3 games that suppot 1080p.

 

[shadow skill]

I like how Sony fanboys claim that HD-DVD isdead and how that someone would be equal to that BlueRay would be the new standard for discs.

It seems pretty forgettable for them to realize that all other consoles and PCs use DVD.
The PS3 is the *ONLY* console that uses BlueRay - all other consoles uses regular DVD9 and they're doing great.

And on top of that, nearly 90% of all PS3 games released so far are under 9 GB in size.

BlueRay hasn't "won" the format war by a longshot and it most likely never will unless it drops its price below the DVD discs.
People aren't stupid and they aren't willing to pay that much for something they cannot see a significant quality-change.

To claim that the PC would soon see BlueRay titles is rediculous and laughable.
PCs have the ability to use serveral install discs since all the data is installed to the harddrive - something consoles can't do. So there is no need for a bigger disc media. PC are doing fine without BlueRay and they will be fine with it for generations to come.

Not to even mention that 99.9999999999% of all PC titles are under DVD5 in size.
Upscaling works different on PCs compared to consoles, so we don't need to load up the discs with giant textures unlike what consoles do.
And don't get me started on that 1080p argument crap. There's barely a handful of PS3 games that suppot 1080p.

Hmm so what you are telling me is that PC games will never make the transition to higher capacity media...That's like saying that CD's will be used en mass forever on pc's because you can install all the data to the hard drive....But obviously this is not the case. According to Wikipedia DVD's first passed VHS rentals in 2003 and the spec for DVDs was written up around 1993! Oh and by the way many ps3 games install data to the hard drive to aid loading times....

You are busy crying about fanboys but you seem to be the only fanboy in this thread...Honestly some of what you say sounds alot like "Cartridge is better than CD." Do you think CDs or DVDs were affordable compared to existing media when the first came out? The answer is hell no! Is the price going to stay the same forever? The answer is not a chance in hell. I actually remember when cd and dvd blanks were expensive as hell and guess what the prices came down alot.....

Since Warner brothers has announced that they will support Blu-ray exclusively starting in May after their current contract ends with the HD-dvd camp I can't see anyone actually going to buy an HD-dvd player or any HD-dvd movies. Even if the consumer does not consider market share they will have to think about who has the movies they actually want to watch over all. It stops being cost effective for consumers to own more than one player if 80% of the movies they watch are played on a Blu-ray device. Because of this simple fact the format is certain to proliferate like DVD did and it would stand to reason that it would then become a standard medium for products released for the pc.

 

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Yes. I would like to see both formats fail. While I could see an advantage to HD (notably in the scene in Clerks where Randal flashes a porno mag at the screen. In a movie theater, you could see it clear as day, on my standard TV, not a thing) it is not a significant enough advantage for most people to care. I know I don't. Particularly if it means another, new, even better format in another ten years. Maybe RedRay or something stupid like that.

Will all due respect, movie industry, go fuck yourselves.

Seriously. I think we should all give the formats a pass the way the public gave CED videodiscs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelectaVision] a pass back in the 80's. A better format is not always necessary.

But idealism is fundamentally useless when the industry is pushing hard for a new format, so we can all buy our movies all over again. But to answer the original question, we probably won't see PC games on the new format until there is a clear winner, i.e. the other team gives up like DIVX [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX_%28Digital_Video_Express%29] Even then, it will be a hard sell. New computers will come equipped with the drives, but few will want to buy one for their existing systems. What they will need is a killer app that helps sell the players. Much like how Myst helped sell people on CD-ROM drives. (hard to believe people were hesitant about getting those and it was MYST that got people to get one) This may take a year or so after one of the formats folds.

 

[hickwarrior]

Warner brothers? I dunno if they make a ton of movies anymore these days. Even though The matrix was published, i think, by them. Is there really that much warner brother movies to care for? That really puzzles me.

 

[shadow skill]

Yes. I would like to see both formats fail. While I could see an advantage to HD (notably in the scene in Clerks where Randal flashes a porno mag at the screen. In a movie theater, you could see it clear as day, on my standard TV, not a thing) it is not a significant enough advantage for most people to care. I know I don't. Particularly if it means another, new, even better format in another ten years. Maybe RedRay or something stupid like that.

Will all due respect, movie industry, go fuck yourselves.

Seriously. I think we should all give the formats a pass the way the public gave CED videodiscs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelectaVision] a pass back in the 80's. A better format is not always necessary.

I can respect that sentiment but the thhing that people miss is that its not really about things looking so omg amazing. Quite frankly I always hated the four and five disc series sets, I am really hoping companies start releasing shows on few discs so I don't have to deal with these huge box sets etc. As I said in the original post I am most concerned about writeable media. I have close to a terabyte of HD space and its mostly full, I'm starting to drown in external drives, need a whole new computer case because i cant even fit all the drives I have in my case, would need to shift everything over to a raid 5 array if I wanted to do a proper fault tolerant setup wich would just cost me even more money negating the relative cheapness of 3.5 (desktop) hard drives.

Then we get into the whole mobile thing, laptop hard drives are sill more expensive and hold less than their desktop counterparts. In reality it is not very hard to completely fill a hard drive with videos which are not even nessecarily "HD!" Typically a dual audio anime rip will be somewhere in the order of 200mb in size, now lets say every 1000mb is a gigabyte for the sake of making this easy. Most shows are about 26 episodes long which makes them just over 5gigs in size. Now lets say we have a 100gb laptop hard drive you will fill it entirely after about 20 series. That does not seem all tha bad however in real life people probably would use these drives for more than just vids, and said vids might actually be closer to 250mb if we are just talking about anime.


In short you can eat through an external laptop drive really quickly and the amount of data you could carry around with you on a long trip is actually less because the external drive would end up taking more physical space than a cd wallet holding maybe ten 25gb bdrs. Which given the earlier numbers of 5gigs a show would come out to something like 50 shows total.

Hick the whole thing with Warner has to do with market share raher than what movies from a studio are "good'" Because the market share angle is becoming more and more lopsided the public will be driven towards Blu-ray because overall the volume of Blu-ray titles released is simply larger.

 

[rawlight]

OOPS, looks like you got some Sony fanbois in our Escapist forums!

shadow skill, just because Warner Bros. is going for Blu-ray exclusively doesn't mean that HD-DVD is dead. Granted, with this recent switch, most studios will be behind Blu-ray now. In reality though, both formats are under-performing in terms of sales of players (the only number that matters) and this "format war" will likely go on for a while longer. The fact is that most consumers don't have a need for either format, as they don't offer much in the way of benefits over regular DVDs.

I predict that one of the drive manufacturers will figure out a way to get both formats to work on one drive, making the whole thing pointless (which it already is). Until there is a direct upgrade path (which will still read "old" DVDs) most consumers will not make the jump.

Also Jack, Myst did not help to sell CD drives either, where did you get that from? It came with CD drives for a while (That's how I got Myst) but I'm not sure how you can draw the conclusion that it helped sell the drives...

 

[shadow skill]

OOPS, looks like you got some Sony fanbois in our Escapist forums!

shadow skill, just because Warner Bros. is going for Blu-ray exclusively doesn't mean that HD-DVD is dead. Granted, with this recent switch, most studios will be behind Blu-ray now. In reality though, both formats are under-performing in terms of sales of players (the only number that matters) and this "format war" will likely go on for a while longer. The fact is that most consumers don't have a need for either format, as they don't offer much in the way of benefits over regular DVDs.

I predict that one of the drive manufacturers will figure out a way to get both formats to work on one drive, making the whole thing pointless (which it already is). Until there is a direct upgrade path (which will still read "old" DVDs) most consumers will not make the jump.

Also Jack, Myst did not help to sell CD drives either, where did you get that from? It came with CD drives for a while (That's how I got Myst) but I'm not sure how you can draw the conclusion that it helped sell the drives...

Next you are going to tell me how these formats are all being beat by DVD which of course would be a given considering market saturation of DVD not to mention that this "war " has split the public so they stayed out of the whole thing. If you really believe that people wont buy new players etc you don't understand how Microsoft maintains dominance in the PC market and probably think that Vista will fail along with DX10. In both cases people looking to purchase upgrades etc are the target here not the people with thirty and forty dvds or people who already have XP.(for now.) It's the same reason that 64bit operating systems will eventually force out 32bit operating systems even though there really is not a performance boost for most people.

Incidentally none of this has much to do with what I was actually asking about.......................

 

[Jack Sheehan]

Pssh the whole format war thing gets a great bit meh from me. In my opinion Microsoft have taken the right route with an optional external drive. pushing blu ray on people who dont want it drove the ps3's price up and almost caused it to fail. It survived because of a dedicated user base willing to accept sony's inflation of the price.

Downloadable content is much easier in my opinion, for example I have Channel 4 (British) on Demand installed on my PC, So I can watch the fonejacker Christmas special or old episodes of father ted with minimal fuss and no incredibly expensive disks and players.

 

[Slycne]

PC Games didn't really start making the shift over to DVD until games started needing 5-6 CDs to install. It will defiantly be several more years until you see PC games looking for a new medium and by then I imagine most companies will have moved to digital download.

 

[shadow skill]

Pssh the whole format war thing gets a great bit meh from me. In my opinion Microsoft have taken the right route with an optional external drive. pushing blu ray on people who dont want it drove the ps3's price up and almost caused it to fail. It survived because of a dedicated user base willing to accept sony's inflation of the price.

Downloadable content is much easier in my opinion, for example I have Channel 4 (British) on Demand installed on my PC, So I can watch the fonejacker Christmas special or old episodes of father ted with minimal fuss and no incredibly expensive disks and players.

I know what you mean, I had a tv tuner before and I may build a media centre to do tivo type stuff when I get some real money. However I think that many people are slow to catch on to the fact that for an overwhelming number of people the whole media centre pc thing is too complicated which is one of the reasons why the whole direct content thing is a pipe dream. It would cost more for these people to purchase a PC for this because they don't build their own boxes etc.

I know I'm more of a high end type consumer but I think many people forget this when they claim that physical media is on the way out any time soon. I happen to like having my computer right next to my tv for various reasons but I know full well many people don't like/can't have such setups hence the need for standalone drives and things like ps3 or hd-dvd addons.

PC Games didn't really start making the shift over to DVD until games started needing 5-6 CDs to install. It will defiantly be several more years until you see PC games looking for a new medium and by then I imagine most companies will have moved to digital download.

Thats true, although if media costs come down enough I wonder if PC game makers who are always pushing game requirements much faster than consoles might take the chance and create games that would span five or six dvds since they could use a Blu-ray (or hd-dvd I guess) and not piss off the player by having him or her change discs five or six times during the install sooner rather than later.

 

[hickwarrior]

So i see that the format war is all about space that can be set on the disk. But looking in the comments, this will take a long time before it kicks in.

Maybe the marketing is done very poorly, saying that HD will look like perfect, or Blu-ray for that matter. But we are already got the best visual candy someone can get, so now it's all about the art. But i'm digressing.

I don't see that the DVD format being vanquished in two years, maybe three years if it's unlucky. Anyway, in that sight, Blu-ray will make it easily, and HD-DVD will be dead, unless they somehow can stash more data in that bloody thing.

 

[Jimmyjames]

What on earth are you talking about?? I'm lucky enough to have a fairly biggish HDTV. We've got a stanard dvd player linked up to it, and movies look absolutely fine. Watched the Matrix the other day, no complaints at all, looked as sweet as a bell.

As for DVDs on the way out, they're still vastly outsellking blu-ray and hddvd combine.

I'm going to guess that you don't have any HD sources running into your TV? Not the digital-cable "fake" HD, but TRUE HD? I didn't think there was any difference, either until I saw it connected. Now it's hard for me to even watch a standard DVD for all the compression artifacts.

But that's just me. I'm kind of a videophile.

As for DVD being on the way out, it is. There is a HUGE installed base, and the studios won't abandon it it entirely for awhile, but think about it- What retailer even CARRIES VHS anymore? There are still plenty of players out there. The same thing will happen to DVD, and the biggest reason is piracy. It is INSANELY easy to make perfect copies of DVDs. This pisses the industry off.