FAO Mr Doom9

[zeroprobe]

I cannot help but notice your bias towards bluray on the frontpage news.

Yes just looking at it from a drm perspective hd-dvd is the best option, but im sure blu-ray is not safe whatever they do if thats what your worried about.

Dual layer 50gb is what wins it for me and also the name too :). I was just wondering your reasons for hd-dvd

[Doom9]

Bias? Since when is ripping propaganda to shreds biased? Show me anything I've written about BD that isn't true..
HD DVD isn't so much the better option as the lesser of two evils.

You mention size.. yet I find it peculiar that over all titles that have come out in both formats, the HD DVD titles have the upper hand in video quality. Thus, it isn't so much about the available size, than it is about using a good encoder and tweaking encodes and that's it for me with regards to size. Take size away and you have what? More DRM, and a company behind the format that has done nothing but screwed us for the last decade.

A few examples:
ATRAC instead of MP3 players
Non standard MP4 on the PSP
MemoryStick instead of CF/SD
Arccos
Rootkits
Audio CDs with the SCMS "I am a copy" flag set (I recall the MiniDisc PR that touted MD as the perfect companion to take your CDs on the road very vividly.. setting the SCMS copy bit to true terminates the possibility to make a copy of your original CD and completely breaches the hara contract which says you can make copies from your original CD, but those copies cannot be copied digitally anymore - it comes down to Sony telling me "hey, it's your fault you were stupid enough to believe we'll let you record digitally" (and it's not only the legal situation.. I also paid levies on my MD recorder and on every blank disc I ever bought)).
Exploding batteries
BD-ROM
BD+

With video quality (my main factor for any digital format) out of the way, DRM is my main factor.. and one layer versus three layers just wins hands down. Furthermore, it seems harder to recover keys from BD discs (check the ripping forum). Oh, and there are no region codes on HD DVD, and the managed copy situation (not that I care much about it but it's still a consumer friendlyness indicator) is also better for HD DVD - and all players come with all the interactivity features versus Blu-ray where you have but one player that can actually handle BD-J (consequently, you'll find no discs yet making use of BD-J.. and whether it'll really be used fully remains to be seen.. a lot of authoring people aren't really into java programming ;)

The 50GB at this point remind me of people buying a computer with a 500GB HD, then never use more than 15GB (windows, office, their emails, and the webbrowser cache) - show me a HD DVD title that really suffers visually due to the lack of space and I might reconsider, but at this point the size thing is merely PR. And if you'd like to bring TV series now, I consider having one more or less disc for an entire season to be rather irrelevant.

And name wise.. well, does it matter?, HD DVD isn't terribly innovative, but nobody can place Blu-ray, and in fact, HD DVD goes with HD TV which may just be why it was chosen.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Audio CDs with the SCMS "I am a copy" flag set (I recall the MiniDisc PR that touted MD as the perfect companion to take your CDs on the road very vividly.. setting the SCMS copy bit to true terminates the possibility to make a copy of your original CD and completely breaches the hara contract which says you can make copies from your original CD, but those copies cannot be copied digitally anymore - it comes down to Sony telling me "hey, it's your fault you were stupid enough to believe we'll let you record digitally" (and it's not only the legal situation.. I also paid levies on my MD recorder and on every blank disc I ever bought)).And lets not forget, Sony were the first company to break the official "Compact Disc Digital Audio" standard. A standard they helped develop with Philips.

They also produced the utterly useless and now abandoned MicroMV digital video tape format.

EDIT: And what's the crack with these kinds of comments: -

http://i19.tinypic.com/48ludzq.png

And why force their new .M2T and .M2TS storage systems....


Cheers

[~bT~]

I totally HATE Sony for screwing me with the MD.
No more Sony products for me.

[zeroprobe]

I hate the idea of two formats, so one must win it for me. I really hate the idea of them co-existing with dual format players and discs with different coloured cases for my movies. Combos yuck.

With how the studios look I favour bluray. I think it can defeat the competition the quickest. I don't think hddvd can compete with PS3 about, it is just delaying the inevitable. Don't get me wrong it has taken hddvd to bring bluray up to its quality level, so we have to thank them for that.

3 hour epic with lossless audio and a top bitrate I think will have trouble fitting on a dual layer hddvd.

P.S dont forget the 3 1/2" floppy sony created.

[Doom9]

With how the studios look I favour bluray.Studios will go where the money are. Sony is Blu-ray exclusive because it gets royalties for each player and disc sold. Fox is Blu-ray because they like to turture their paying clientele with BD+. Disnay is Blu-ray because of the reason Fox is, plus the family thing (no pr0n).
And now who was on DIVX's side back on the day? Fox and Disney were DIVX' staunchest supporters. But finally, the market decided, not the studios. If enough people refuse to buy Blu-ray, the HD DVD holdouts are going to cave. It doesn't take more than it would take for Universal to start releasing Blu-ray discs.

So don't just resignate and let studios impose more DRM upon you.

3 hour epic with lossless audio and a top bitrate I think will have trouble fitting on a dual layer hddvd.Shouldn't you wait and see if that's indeed the case before proclaiming it with no basis? AVC beats the crap out of Sony's MPEG-2 and allows for serious bitrate reduction that give more space. And while lossless audio has a certain transcoding appeal, the people who have the equipment and hearing to hear the difference (no headphones for this one.. this is movies we're talking about) are rare. Remember all those that claim to hear the difference between 320kbit/s MP3 and an audio CD and how utterly they failed to do so in a non biased test? I recall the person to be the most reliable at differentiating actually had a hearing impairment that resulted in him being a lot more sensible towards certain things than the human being.
At this point, I prefer to wait for the LOTR extended edition in both formats before making any hasty calls on whether 30 GB isn't enough.

[zeroprobe]

Yes people bring up the DIVX argument with Disney and Fox but it is totally different. EVERYONE hated divx as it was Pay Per Play which neither hddvd or bluray are.

If one of the formats were Pay Per Play it would be complete victory for the other side.

[Doom9]

You're not reading me correctly.. this isn't about a format war DIVX versus DVD, this is about studios exclusively supporting one format in the hope that this would sway consumers to chose sides.
And DIVX wasn't all rental.. don't you recall DIVX silver and DIVX gold?