The 2 HD Formats

[Guy Robinson]

Is anyone else here upset about the fact that there are 2 competing formats once again? This time in the form of HD. The people on this forum are not average consumers. The average consumer will not make a decision either way until there is a clear winner. I'm not sure how that will happen when people aren't taking the plunge. There may not be enough people ever entering either stream to determine a winner in the eyes of the average consumer. Frankly I hope they both flop. Maybe then there will be some mass panic in the boardrooms and standarization will occur. SACD and DVD-A are virtually dead except for some companies still issuing Classical and Jazz discs to those markets. I guess the demise of those 2 formats wasn't a big enough wake-up call for the companies involved. They still went ahead with 2 different HD formats. I think that the stance with most people here on this forum is to play a waiting game as well. We are usually early adopters yet this is the stance most of us are taking. That does not bode well for either of the HD formats. Hang tough. Let's send them a message.

 

[Chris Gerhard]

Two formats doesn't necessarily mean both will fail. Obviously VHS succeeded and went on to a long life as a mainstream format. Compact cassette and 8-track arrived at about the same time and one survived for a long ride. Competition meant that HD DVD arrived priced right from the start and I don't think that would have happened without Blu-ray. It is not clear either will amount to much at this point but I don't think the fact two formats started out at the same time will be the reason both fail if that happens. Either the public will want something better than DVD or they won't and I don't know if the public cares yet. I wanted only Blu-ray to see the light of day, but it hasn't gotten off to a very good start in terms of quality so now I am thinking it is good that HD DVD was launched. Blu-ray will either get better quickly or HD DVD will be all that survives.

Chris

 

[JonUrban]

I hate it too, and am not jumping. However, if I were, I would go with HD-DVD, and not just because Sony is the "other guy". Only time will tell, but I would hope to see a DENON 3920 or something like that doing HD something, as well as retaining SACD and DVD-A. I can dream, can't I?

 

[Manmc]

I think these formats arrived about 2 years too early. They could have spent that time perfecting and/or unifying into a single format with Mch. Lossless as standard as well as allowing time for most displays to reach native 1080p levels.

And , after all , Sony IS the other guy Possibly the ONLY entity on this planet that could have pi$$ed off their target demographic ( us!) before and after launch !

Bah Humbug !
~M~

 

[Guy Robinson]

I hate it too, and am not jumping. However, if I were, I would go with HD-DVD, and not just because Sony is the "other guy". Only time will tell, but I would hope to see a DENON 3920 or something like that doing HD something, as well as retaining SACD and DVD-A. I can dream, can't I?

Yeah, I would never buy either unless there is a universal player and one HD format out there.

 

[rusinurbe]

Yeah, I would never buy either unless there is a universal player and one HD format out there.

Universal player for one format !@:

 

[Guy Robinson]

Universal player for one format !@:

I guess I wasn't too clear on that was I. I meant a player that would do SACD and DVD-A and HD. And the HD format it played would be the only one available out there or at least it would be the universally adopted HD format.

 

[ferret-e]

http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/technology/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=190300953

 

[Guy Robinson]

http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/technology/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=190300953

It says nothing about SACD and DVD-A though.

 

[VACamper]

I'm betting that HD-DVD will be the survivor in this battle, given that the initial players hit the market with a 3 month lead, at half the price of the initial Blue Ray players, with twice as many titles available. Furthermore, based on the discs released to date, HD-DVD video quality is outstanding, while Blue Ray titles are comparatively lousy -- just a little better than standard DVD video quality, but nowhere near as good as even broadcast or Satellite HD video. This may be enough to seal the fate of Blue Ray forever.

I'd have jumped on the $500 HD-DVD player already, but for one problem -- I only have one multi-channel analog input on my Yamaha surround receiver, and that is connected to my Denon 2910 universal player. I'm not going to give up DVD-A/SACD playback for HD-DVD. I really don't want another external switchbox (already have one of those for DVI switching), and I'm not aware of any switchers designed for this purpose that work via remote control anyway. You would think the AV companies would have seen this coming and started putting at least two multi-channel analog inputs on their higher-end receivers and processors. Are any of you aware of any that have two or more inputs?

So, I'm holding out for whichever comes first: (1) a true universal player, (2) a suitable external switcher, or (3) an A/V surround receiver with two or more multi-channel inputs, and enough other features and capabilities to warrant an expensive upgrade from my otherwise perfectly capable Yamaha RV-V3300.

 

[neil wilkes]

One of the problems that early adopters will face is the issue of the half-implementation on both camps here.
The idea is that with HDMI 1.3, the analogue intervconnects will be phased out completely, and everything will go through the HDMI system - complete with digital handshaking & key switches every 4 seconds or so (designed to prevent someone like us plugging an HD DVD player into the AV amp to get the handshake, and then whipping the HDMI lead out & into a recorder to get the streams out off the disc.)
These techniques will simply not work with either format - the player will "see" an "unapproved" device is connected, and playback will stop.
Blu Ray may also implement a player shutdown if any attempts are made to hack the Region Control circuitry, or play a disc whose key has been revoked. This would then require a trip to the repair shop to have the unit re-initialized.
Problem is - and this is why it might not be implemented - is that if you own a perfectly legal disc whose keys have been hacked (as DeCSS does) then that disc will be interpreted as a hacked one, and will not only refuse to play but also shut down the player too.
A mandatory online connection is almost certainly going to be required as well, as one of the "features" of these discs is the way you will be able to access a section of the disc that will connect online & download/stream the data to your amp/screens rather than have it on-disc and presumably out of date by the time it is released.

I'm fence sitting for a while yet.
This won't start t happen properly for a couple of years yet - and may well be superseded by streaming technology that will give Movies on demand, either streamed to a FileServer or else downloaded to a temporary smart card (storage capacity is on the up here, and they can be timebombed as well.) The rental market is seriously interested here, and a combination of the rental markets & the porn markets will determine what comes out on top here. BRD, with it's 0.1mm technology, could yet prove to be extremely fragile. Only time will tell, but I still feel this is too little, too late, too expensive.

I hope I am utterly wrong here and this does wonders for our favourite subject - Multichannel Music.
We shall see.

 

[ferret-e]

It says nothing about SACD and DVD-A though.

DVD-A is physically the same as DVD. SACD is based on DVD too, in some degree...

 

[Chris Gerhard]

If Blu-ray doesn't get better by year's end, I will just buy HD DVD and hope for the best. I have plenty of redundancy now to be able to play DVD-A/SACD for the remainder of my life with several of the cheap universal players so no compatibility with those formats with either new HD disc player won't bother me much. I don't have a turntable or 8-track or open reel in any system now so I don't mind having two disc players in at least one system. I still think Blu-ray will right the ship, mean start to use VC-1 rather than MPEG2, and that will be what I want early next year. If no multichannel audio format takes off with the new player, I can live with it, unlike when Q8 and Quad open reel and Quad LP died out, I have enough SACD/DVD-A discs to keep me going for the long run.

Chris

 

[surroundophile]

Did anybody catch the comment in the Jul/Aug issue of The Perfect Vision, where they reviewed the Toshiba HD-DVD player?
They said "With MLP decoding, you might think that HD DVD players would be able to handle DVD-Audio discs, but alas, this is not so. Performing all the decoding listed above requires serious DSP horsepower, which is why DVD-Audio is not supported. High resolution, audio-only HD DVD titles are likely to start appearing as authoring facilities ramp up."

 

[QuadraTOMic]

Going back to universal players, I saw in the trades that a licensee of Blue Ray is prohibited from making a universal player at the risk of losing the Blue Ray license. (I may have it backwards) If we were to see a universal player, it would be from an off-brand chinese company. Hence either questionable quality or worse the major CE firms may wake up and try to block the off-brand firms from distributing HD players worldwide. This is akin, and a possibility of correcting their mistakes, mistakes made when the market they lost - read: high profit margins - in DVD player sales to the chinese firms happened. Either way I not encouraged and suspect one format will fall out. I'm not saying immediately but over a relatively short period of time it could. It could because it can and did happen: there is talk of XM and Sirius combining; Echostar did try to buy DirecTV; VHS and Beta. I can go on forever.