I am going to call this one, seeing that Netflix and Walmart both dropped HD DVD, and Toshiba is rumored to be thinking of pulling out.

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23204819/

Blu Ray, succeding where betamax failed

Yep I'm convinced that it's all over but the shouting. Blu-ray is the heir presumptive, and it won't be a moment too soon when the rest of the HD-DVD consortium throw in the towel and we can get to buying some HD movies. Then we can get the HD-DVD exclusive movies released on Blu-ray. I want my Apollo 13 HD, but not enough to buy an obsolete player to view it on.

On a sad note, a friend of mine who is really into Netflix bought a HD-DVD player one day before they announced that they were going to be exclusively Blu-ray. Talk about lousy timing.

On the other hand, if want movies that are currently out on HD-DVD I bet they're going to be real cheap soon.

Tex

I'm not very pleased to see this happening. Blu-ray may be technically more advanced, on paper... But is it so much more advanced in reality? Their players are terribly overpriced, they have about ten different "levels" of machines (you know Blu-ray 1, 1.1, 1.2 and so on) their "interactive part" is enabled in what "version"? I haven't even followed that situation anymore, as I hoped HD-DVD would win this war. On paper they have bigger capacity, but in reality, do they exist?
Anyway, after the rant, I'm happy about only one format being around. Hopefully they don't now start to keep the prices at high level, because there is no competition...

I don't really care either way as long as they finally decide which it is to be. What annoys me is that we cant get a drive that allows both formats to be used. I mean to say... when DVD took over they still allowed CD to be intergrated with it... still I must confess that I am not really conversant with the whole concept and maybe they cant communicate together.
What i do know is that i am not even interested until such time the new drives are retailed for $100AU or less.

I am also assuming the drives will be SataII drives.
I also assume that the new drive will be compatible with all LCD Monitors but maybe we will need newer better ones? I am guessing though that the old CRT will be officially dead.




ROM

There are combo drives that run both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but I imagine that they are going away soon.

As far as a drive being able to read both conventional DVDs and HD discs, my understanding is there's a complication. Both DVDs and CDs used red lasers to read and write the information, so making a combo drive was pretty easy. The new generation of HD discs use a blue laser, which allow them to put information closer together which gives you a higher aureal density on the disc.

To make a combo drive you have to put in a blue laser for the HD disc, and a red one for the legacy DVDs. Since the laser and transport mechanism are the expensive part of a drive, you are basically making two players in one box, which can be prohibitively expensive to market.

I don't buy that. Lite-On issued a Blu-ray multi-ROM for $200, and the HD-X9 reads laserdiscs with a red laser. (Laserdisc lasers were infrared, and so were CD players' lasers).

Well I would love some clever manufacturer to prove me wrong and release a combo drive for the same price as a stand-alone player.

Tex

Playstaton 3 supports Blu-ray and CD / DVD types as well. So it's definitely possible.

Texfire wrote:

Well I would love some clever manufacturer to prove me wrong and release a combo drive for the same price as a stand-alone player. Tex

$200 isn't low enough for you?

mister_scary wrote:

Texfire wrote: Well I would love some clever manufacturer to prove me wrong and release a combo drive for the same price as a stand-alone player. Tex $200 isn't low enough for you?

For me, yes. For the mass market maybe not. And I'm not talking about computer peripherals. I'm talking about a stand-alone player for HD that the average consumer is going to want to buy.

Most consumers don't understand what HDTV is, much less the difference between HD and standard DVDs. My mom bought a HDTV to replace another older TV. She called me over with the complaint that the HD signal didn't look any better than the old one, and was her HD TV broken? Sure enough she was running the coaxial cable into it rather than the component out from the HD box.

It's the manufacturers fault. They've confused the issue with multiple standards and multiple cabling solutions for the same problem. That's before they start adding DRM to the signal chain and screw things up royally. Don't even get me started on the mess that is DVI/HDMI.

The challenge is to make a box for the "average" consumer that will let them use their old DVDs as well as newer HD discs transparently, at a price close to or identical to a standard DVD player. I'm not sure the manufacturers can do that without having to charge too much to move units at Walmart.

Tex