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one down one to go.

that's kinda my thinking as well. soon there will be an option to buy/download the hd movies online. then the disk format war will be over, with two clear losers.

I think it's still a ways off.  A 60gb file would take a little bit of time to download....

I think the tread title is a bit misleading, because Toshiba has not officially released a statement.  I definitely believe that the info here is correct though.

The Warner announcement in January signaled the end for me, and obviously it's just snowballed in the industry since then.  Last week we had the announcements from Netflix, Best Buy, and then Walmart, right in a row.  Major disaster for HD-DVD.

I'm sure we'll see an announcement from Toshiba SOON.

Discs aren't obsolete yet.  I think there's still a long life ahead.  I have a 300 gig media drive (which is more than most people have), and at 60GB a pop, I can only cram five movies onto that drive, not to mention the download time.  Alternatively, I could get movies in the lower-quality 720p, or split the difference and get 1080i.  But I want the full 1080p with no noticeable compression artifacts, which implies high bitrate.

It's easy to project the iTunes model onto movies, but it's a totally different game.  Music works because people can download a high-quality song instantly, store it easily, and play it anywhere.  With movies, those three elements don't exist to a large extent - and won't exist for the foreseeable future.  Average household broadband speeds are shockingly pathetic, and even in the best case, a 60GB movie will take a loooong time to download.  You could compromise by going with 720p at a low bitrate, put up with some compression artifacts, and get the file size down to around 8GB, but why bother?  The quality reduction is harsh, and you still have to contend with download times, storage issues, and DRMs.  Why not just get a 40mbps 1080p blu ray disc?

But anyway, I'm glad the disc war is finally over.

Last edited by Mr. T (2008-02-17 2:24 pm)

Whats not to get? A lot of applications are going download and are quite popular. Things like Xbox arcade and the Wii Shop Channel are download only. Additionally, a lot of people don't even have a "true" HD setup and are not really benefitting from "HD". It is kind of like the wooden knobs people buy to make their sound system sound "better". If they can't notice the difference they're not going to care. In the age of things like Netflix the distribution system is obviously key. If they can just on demand get stuff then it will beat waiting around a month for the disk as in netflix or driving to the store.

I think when Flash memory harddrives are at the same level in capacity as SATA harddrives and increased Broadband speed with higher download caps, then I could see a total move to downloads over optical discs for full quality HD. Right now isn't the time. Normal consumers don't have the know how or the money to spend on terabyte drives to hold there downloaded media and to make a backup of it incase of a harddrive failure. People with computer knowledge know what to do, but regular people don't.

Of course I think that backup will evolve and that flash drives will be the standard, but I don't think with bandwidth limits and harddrive limitations, that optical discs will go bye-bye any time soon. I live up in Canada and just a month ago we got TV shows on iTunes. But even that is limited, no big shows like Heroes, Lost, Grey Anatomy, Law and Order, CSIs, etc. (not saying I like all those show, just showing some examples). The Apple TV is basically useless right now in Canada unless you like the TV shows on iTunes Canada or like to watch YouTube or video podcasts. You can't rent or purchase any movies. Also you have to worry about copy-protection and being able to move the media file from one product to another, without trying to find away to rip it and re-encode it. It's harder to lend a friend a movie from iTunes vs. lending a DVD/BluRay disc to play in there player.

There are a lot more choices for downloadable content in the U.S. but in other countries its not so much. For a format to become useless and obsolete it's gonna have to saturate more than one market.

I'm just happy the format war is over. I think the only good thing it brought was lower priced HD-DVD/BluRay discs. Now lets hope with the end to the war that the studios and Sony don't get greedy and raise the prices of the discs. That will make price conscience consumers to stick with DVD and up-converting DVD players.

here's one thing Apple needs to do... NOW... if they really want to push HD downloads: refresh/update the effing "All HD" movie section on AppleTV.

i was browsing through the iTMS on the Mini tonight and noticed that Resident Evil:Extinction was now available for rental. the iTMS page for it noted that it was available for HD rental as well. yay! i can finish watching the trilogy now!

except its not listed (as of 2.54am, CST) in the ubiquitous "All HD" section. if you do a search for it, you'll certainly find it, including the option to rent in HD. so that's good, but... i don't want to have to search all around to find newly available HD selections, and neither will other people.

they also need to arrange the rental section much like they do when browsing the iTMS, by listing New Releases/Rentals in a seperate section. as much as i'm able to, i don't want to have to manually search for what's hot off the Apple movie presses.

a handful of things i feel that need to be accomplished by Apple...

1) post something that is consistently updated regarding what's available for HD rental, whether it be a newsletter or something on the iTMS.

2) allow for purchase of an HD rental via the iTMS on non-AppleTV hardware (read: one's desktop or notebook). i'm not asking for the rental to transfer to a computer before it gets to an AppleTV, but a system like this: find movie, purchase HD rental, AppleTV gets notice of impending/incoming rental, watch movie, profit.

3) allow for rentals purchased on the AppleTV to be transferred to the "home" computer for use on iPod/iPhone/iPod Touch/computer. you currently allow for transfer the other way 'round, so why not this way?

now i just need to reconfigure my Harmony 550 remote to stop sending signals to my AppleTV when i do something unrelated to it. i somehow managed to rent Mr. Brooks without my knowledge while watching TV. imagine my surprise when i switched back over to my ATV and was greeted with the message "your rental download is complete." oops.

i wanted to see the movie, don't get me wrong, but i didn't want it right now.

Last edited by LukeLucas (2008-02-19 3:12 am)

We all knew it was a matter of time, but when a thread title says "Official", it should be truly official, not just very very likely.  Now the thread title is absolutely appropriate.  Even though anyone with any sense knew HD-DVD was done for months ago, it still wasn't 'official' until today.

Thegreenman wrote:

This is still a scandal which ever way you look at it!, what of the people who have payed good money for these boxes etc, the company's  involved in should have found some way to agree a standard format, it's the old Betamax thing all over again & as usual it's the customer who loose out.

Which is why everyone should have boycotted until a format was agreed upon.

-mark

I have an HD-DVD player.



Actually it's just the add-on for the xbox 360.  Thankfully I only bought a few discs (as frankly this wasn't hard to see coming). 

RIP.