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bratboy wrote:

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.

I'm the same way, except I knew deep down that HD-DVD was going to be short lived, which is why I only spent the $200 for the player and got 5 discs total. They'll be easy to replace and I didn't invest a whole buttload into it. A couple of my HD-DVD's are already on Blu-Ray too, but some are still exclusive so I'll wait patiently. Though I might have mentioned it either here or in another forum that the only one I have that matters that I want Blu-Ray rerelease ASAP is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It looks amazing in its HD transfer. As does the Back to the Future Trilogy. Those four movies combined on Blu-Ray would make me the happiest movie watcher in the world. (Original movies being shot on film for the win!) Especially if the BTTF movies still include all the extras. (The Wonka HD-DVD has every special feature that the DVD release had, including the commentary by the kids and the documentary.)

I still wish they had just merged the formats already. Made all players a hybrid. But I'll take a single format as long as the studios get busy converting over all the exclusives ASAP.

[Goes back to dreaming of the Back to the Future trilogy on HD discs...]

I have a soft spot for old movies. If the DVD of The Wizard of Oz weren't already the highest quality ever possible, I'd be wishing for that too, but the DVD is pretty much perfection.

I don't think Apple knew it, but they weren't going to commit to either side before a winner was chosen.  It would have been like shooting themselves in the foot to say "look, we support Sony," before they knew that Blu-Ray was going to win.

mo' ron wrote:

A lot of bluray owner are going to get burned when discs come out that won't play on their non-upgradeable players.

Cool, thanks. Now I know why HD-DVD lost. Any format which does not force market-wide re-purchasing of players every year or two is clearly not sustainable. That'll learn 'em up for trying an end run around The Law of Planned Obsolescence.

I am curious to see how MicroSoft reacts to this situation.

mikedemo wrote:

So when the hell is Paramount rolling out the "Transformers" movie on Blu-Ray.

My PS3 is turning out to be a great investment. With Blu-Ray on top, the press can finally shut the hell up about how Sony's strategy was flawed. A little over a year later the and the PS3 has sold more units in its year one than the Xbox 360 year one.

Blu-Ray was going to win and even Apple knew it.

I don't know that the success of Blu-Ray indicates that Sony's "strategy" with regards to the PS3 isn't flawed....

mikedemo wrote:

..My PS3 is turning out to be a great investment. With Blu-Ray on top, the press can finally shut the hell up about how Sony's strategy was flawed. A little over a year later the and the PS3 has sold more units in its year one than the Xbox 360 year one.

...losing a bundle on each. More to the point, how many games have they sold- you know, the things that make money, not lose it. AFAIK the PS3's attach rate does not impress... Howard Stringer might be happy, but not all the folks in the games div are wearing shades.

Blu-Ray was going to win and even Apple knew it.

Or they both got lucky.

test wrote:

I am curious to see how MicroSoft reacts to this situation.

user wrote:

They'll rip-off Sony's design.

Sony's design for what?.. anyway MS has had a foot in the BD camp as a fallback for ages. They could likely release a BD 360 add-on as soon as it made sense and production ramped.

On the games side there's GoW 2, 4.5 million units sold. Shoe-in for 5-6 million in time for a Xmas release.

That all sounds reasonable. And MicroSoft does seem a bit more responsive to real-world market forces lately and less prone to heavy-handed imposition of their own way. They certainly have the talent and resources on hand to get a BD player to market in short order and ramp up the online/download side as well.

F041 wrote:

Yeah, it's not quite official but it will be dead soon. Personally I am thinking about picking up an HD DVD player and some movies when they're cheap, knowing that they won't have a long future. Are there HD DVD burners out that fit in an optical bay?

There are blueray burners that fit a 5.25" bay - I'm going to buy one once they fall below the $150 price mark. I assume there are HD-DVD burners that do, but seriously, go BlueRay for burning - unless you don't want family/friends to be able to view the media you burn.

resedit wrote:

I'm in the process of converting all my normal non HD-DVD Stargates to DivX - DivX < DVD < Blueray - and space is a serious problem. Especially if you back up your data like a good user should.

Apples to oranges to peaches, no? DivX is a codec, DVD (at least commercial) is a medium that almost exclusively uses the MPEG-2 codec, and commercial Blu-ray discs use either the VC-1 or H.264 codecs for their movies.

So your newfangled ways confuse me.

Myself, I would go DivX for content up to DVD (720x480) content, and H.264 for HD (720p and up), assuming I could offload processing a la the latest video chipsets. Fine quality, easy on CPU util and battery life where important. ATi at least will upscale well to 2560x1600.

People who think full High definition downloads are likely to replace physical disks anytime soon are nuts. I have standard cable internet which gives me a consistent 500Kps download speed and at that the 70gig per movie download would saturate my connection for a couple of days.
Heck, I skip HiDef downloads I can get for free because I dont want to tie up my connection for that long. I would need a connection at least 10 times as fast as I have now to even consider HiDef downloads. That is not even on the horizon.
At the rate fibre is being rolled out there will be enough homes with it to make HiDef downloads feasible in about 50 years, if then.
I am slightly disappointed BluRay won because its a Sony backed technology but don't really care all that much.

Pariah wrote:

People who think full High definition downloads are likely to replace physical disks anytime soon are nuts. I have standard cable internet which gives me a consistent 500Kps download speed and at that the 70gig per movie download would saturate my connection for a couple of days.
Heck, I skip HiDef downloads I can get for free because I dont want to tie up my connection for that long. I would need a connection at least 10 times as fast as I have now to even consider HiDef downloads. That is not even on the horizon.
At the rate fibre is being rolled out there will be enough homes with it to make HiDef downloads feasible in about 50 years, if then.
I am slightly disappointed BluRay won because its a Sony backed technology but don't really care all that much.

I agree - but they wouldn't be 70gig/movie.

In all liklihood they would be compressed - I've seen 720p movies compressed to 2GB that still look stunning.

resedit wrote:

Pariah wrote:

People who think full High definition downloads are likely to replace physical disks anytime soon are nuts. I have standard cable internet which gives me a consistent 500Kps download speed and at that the 70gig per movie download would saturate my connection for a couple of days.
Heck, I skip HiDef downloads I can get for free because I dont want to tie up my connection for that long. I would need a connection at least 10 times as fast as I have now to even consider HiDef downloads. That is not even on the horizon.
At the rate fibre is being rolled out there will be enough homes with it to make HiDef downloads feasible in about 50 years, if then.
I am slightly disappointed BluRay won because its a Sony backed technology but don't really care all that much.

I agree - but they wouldn't be 70gig/movie.

In all liklihood they would be compressed - I've seen 720p movies compressed to 2GB that still look stunning.

And what does that do for the people who don't have access to broadband internet connections?  I was running dialup until a couple years ago when a local provider offered the wireless broadband I am using now.  Even so, I have to pay through the nose for relatively slow connections ($90/mo for 1mbps).  Most of the people in this area are still on dialup.  IIRC, most of the internet users in this country are on dialup, and broadband hasn't become as universal as some would like to think.

Orion wrote:

And what does that do for the people who don't have access to broadband internet connections?

It's no fun even on broadband - a 2GB download is a HUGE download.