It’s funny, the industry seems so sanguine about the whole high-def DVD format war. This article here, for example, says,
But all sides agree: as high-definition TVs become more popular, consumers will want HD content that will make the investment worthwhile. As screen sizes increase, so does the need for better resolution.
The problem is, I don’t know anyone who wants the new DVD format. HD content, sure — on broadcast channels. But DVDs are already pretty nice.
DVDs offer clear advantages to me over VHS tapes beyond the visuals. You can skip anywhere in them. They have extras. They don’t get eaten up by an old VCR. They don’t get demagnetized by accident. They are smaller to store (and I am one of those idiots who keeps the cases!). CDs offered mostly the same advantages over tapes.
HD DVD formats don’t offer any of these things. Instead, what they offer is only the more detailed picture. But in practice, my component signal out of a DVD is already plenty; I have a nice big widescreen TV, and it’s gonna have to be a hell of a visual upgrade to persuade me.
As it is, the added space isn’t much of an attraction; I haven’t listened to the commentary tracks (three of them!) on most of my DVDs. I get bored watching 8 hours of featurettes.
At GDC, Phil Harrison was touting the advantages of BluRay from a game developer’s point of view as being “more space for assets!” and “now you can launch all international SKUs on one disc!” Frankly, neither of those sound like a big draw to me; assets are the big cost that’s hurting game development as it is, and being able to slip some international releases was always a trick for having some slack in your schedule.
I definitely appreciate my HD channels on digital cable. I prefer watching shows there than on other channels, although when Veronica Mars airs, it doesn’t matter that I don’t get it in HD. So it’s not like I don’t “get” HD; I do and I like it a lot. But DVDs look good enough to me, especially given the outlay already. I imagine there are some of you out there who are lusting after the new HD DVD formats… anyone want to tell me why?
36 Responses to “HD/Blu-Ray”
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I played a student in Episode 16, which was partly filmed at Hilltop High School in Chula Vista. 🙂
Being on the set of a TV production is an incredible learning experience as you are able to first hand observe how the set is constructed for screen, how much work is involved, and why the actors do what they do. Veronica Mars was also created and is filmed locally by Stu Segall Productions in Clairemont Mesa.
Yeah, I know my story was irrelevant to HD/Blu-Ray…
I’m not interested in HD or Blu-Ray though. Neither provide a compelling case for quality over cost.
I know I’m the exception rather than the rule, but I’m enough of an A/V phile that I would already have one or the other if we had an agreed upon standard that has enough support.
What I’ve noticed is that the current war is causing the opposite to happen – I’ve stopped buying normal DVDs, because I’d rather have the HD+ versions of them, and I’m waiting for a format to be agreed upon. As such, I’m netflixing everything and not buying anything right now.
Same here…I stopped buying DVDs in January 2005.
I am not going to re-buy anything I have on DVD, but I will certainly prefer a HD disc to a DVD.
Actually, I might re-buy things like Alien, Gladiator, the new Star Wars and other cult films I love dearly.
I’m with Damion. I stopped buying DVDs as well. I’m sort of excited about HD on DVD for the same reason you prefer watching the HD channels, but I’m never going to build up a collection of hundreds of them (or box games) again. Long live Netflix and Gamerang. (Although really, they are just patches until on-demand is ubiquitous.)
–matt
*blank look* There are HD DVDs?
This is the same arguments over DVD-Audio and the poor quality of the MP3 format dooming it to niche application. The engineers and studio execs are the same kind of people who bought laser-discs in the pre-DVD era, that buy $20K home stereos and swear that the tube amplifier on them seriously improves the sound. They aren’t wrong, they’re just irrelevant.
Most of us can’t tell the difference (probably most of them can’t either, really). And our A/V equipment isn’t so much a status symbol as a simple appliance, if it does what we need it to do, we’re satisfied.
Blu-Ray is almost certainly doomed, just like every other proprietary storage format Sony has put out since the BetaMax. But I think Raph may be right, that HD-DVD is equally doomed. It serves a need the consumer doesn’t think he has. And most people haven’t yet purchased an HDTV, without which any kind of HD video disc is useless.
–Dave
This is sort of a last stab for the industry that distributes content on hard media. THe problem for them is not the next gen format. It’s broadband.
People want HD content. Even the lay person can easily tell the difference between HD video on an HD screen and non-HD on that screen. And the government is turning off the analog broadcast spectrum on 1/1/09 (the date’s been pushed back a lot of times) to repurpose it, so all broadcast will be digital anyway. This has been the driving force behind this transition to HD players, HD TVs and HD content.
But a lot has to change, including getting that old content to the new format. It’s harder to make stuff look way better from DVD to HD-DVD/Blu Ray than it is to make it look better from VHS to DVD.
What’ll maybe sell these formats is the extra features. Both formats have good programming/customization languages, far better than the very rudimentary DVD language (which amounts to holding a few variables in temporary memory, being able to generate random number and being able to rapidly jump to different chapters and indeces… and worse, there’s very inconsistent compliance with this anyway).
I’d personally just go with Microsoft’s Connected Home strategy, or some variant thereof. That’s the future. Distributing content on media will become the archivists purview within 10 years, and then only because old school companies think data must be on media and stored inside mountains 🙂
I agree with that when comparing TV signals to HD.
However, I also have to say that a component DVD signal compared to HD really isn’t as clearcut a case, not with progressive scan DVD players. It’s better, yeah, but not the same leap.
But broadly, I agree with your point: selling bits on atoms is an increasingly shortsighted business model anyway.
[…] Comments […]
Technically, bandwidth is atomic, too.
HD On-Demand *does* have serious gains for the consumer, given a few basic hurdles:
1) It must grant immediate gratification, no waiting for the content to buffer.
2) The terms have to approach or exceed the capabilities and convenience of owning the physical media. If I want to download 20 hours of childrens programming and transfer it from my home to my car, and from my car to my hotel room, I need to be able to do that, or there’s no gain for me.
3) Renting the content on a per-viewing or per-month basis can be acceptable, *if* it is cheaper than the current model of Blockbuster or NetFlix, and equally convenient (see 1). But there still needs to be an option that makes an instance of the material essentially mine for a one-time fee no greater than what I would pay currently for a DVD.
All the business models the media industries are pushing for, with DRM and all the bells and whistles, are designed for *their* gain, and grant little or no benefit to the consumer (usually they are less convenient and more expensive). They want to have their cake and eat it too.
You know where cable-service VOD wins over TiVo? I’ve got both, TiVo is superior in every way except one: if I forget to TiVo something, I have to wait for the next airing, if there is one. On VOD, I can just start it up, or browse for something I might not even have thought to TiVo. But if I was paying extra for that, I wouldn’t do it (I have liftime service plans on my TiVo boxes).
More convenience and lower cost to the consumer will lead to greater consumption and higher revenues. It’s counter-intuitive, but with every form of entertainment delivery in the past, it’s proven true.
–Dave
Quality is the only way they can improve it and unfortunately most people aren’t gonna make that out – you’re right you can’t tell the difference much because most HD sets at this point are 1080i. The newer higher end units can do 1080p – but for everyone who’s aready taken the HD pluge with 1080i, DVD’s aren’t going to look drastically worse than their HD counterparts – or better. If you take 1080p set – then you’re going to get more of a difference in image because there is more resolution. DVD’s can output at 720p which is ALMOST the same as 1080i. So you aren’t gonna see a giant different on those monitors. But that same content can look better on a 1080p set because then there is actually more resolution to make use of it.
Aside from it being the end all be all format war – it’s going to be the death of format wars because there isn’t going to be a clear winner for a long time I fear – and by that point there may be better broadband distribution in place. When arguing between the two formats – I personally feel Blue-Ray is better based on storage capacity alone as it holds much more data. Though I hear that PS3 isn’t going to be able to play Blue-Ray movies – if this pans out to be true and not just a rumor, I think that may end up being the nail in Blue-Ray’s coffin. Without that instant user base to pull from, I don’t think Sony will be able to muster the force to make Blue-Ray a serious contender – HDDVD is aready availible on a limited scale – so Sony is playing catchup in this arena as well.
I don’t buy DVDs. I usually watch a movie once unless I really like it. The DVDs I bought in the past of things I really like never get watched so now I don’t even buy those anymore. Spending 10 bucks to watch something once, I may as well see it in the theater. Netflix is the answer.
I’m hoping Blue Ray will be the standard because I might be able to justify the 600 dollars a PS3 will cost me. Otherwise I may once again not buy a console until the 2nd price drop.
A good point that. The big challenge. Personally, if not for the government wanting this spectrum back, I really think it’d be another decade or so before the cable companies thought enough consumers wanted HD-quality signal to up their networks to deliver it. That’s the gate in my opinion. When the average person watches average TV in HD and sees the differnece, THEN they’ll replace that Fifth Element DVD with the Blu Ray (or HD-DVD) version 🙂
Almost everyone’s missing the point.
And since it seems I’m having this conversation weekly these days, I’ll repeat the cogent points here:
1. “Standard” DVDs will look very ordinary to quality-philes on flatscreen TVs that are bigger than 100cms (40 inches)
2. “Bigger than 100cms” will be the regular size sooner than you think.
3. “Standard” DVDs will be unwatchable by even ordinary folk on anything bigger than 150cms.
4. A new, “more pixels” standard is therefore required as our desires for the bigger, more affordable screens coming down the pipe is not likely to go away. This is doubly true in emerging markets where there’s no “but I just bought a big flatscreen for $10,000!” (sucker!) factor.
It’s simple, really. People saying “but normal DVDs look fine on my screen” are just not getting it. It’s not about your 70cm CRT anymore. That’s what DVDs were aimed at. Target successfully hit. But technology moves on.
Your screen is almost certainly smaller than 40 inches, and if it’s not, it’s doing all sorts of tricks to make the image “seem” clean, like putting a lens in front of it and making the pixels bigger like a projector does. Shudder.
Once you’ve seen real HD content on a really big, HD screen, you’ll want one. And, sooner than you think, you’ll be able to afford one.
I have a 50 inch HD set, actually. And I get true HD content via digital cable. The leap up from current DVDs to true HD is, again, really not that spectacular.
I also think that standard DVDs are most certainly not unwatchable on bigger screens — what gave you that idea?
It really does depend on the TV once you get larger that 42-50 inches. TV’s with really good upscalers do a much better job of it. Some don’t do as well and you can get some pretty bad images. Though your milage will vary. Some people won’t care. Others will. But I agree with Shan for the most part. I don’t consider the image qualty on larger cheaper sets to be very acceptable with DVD’s. But as Shan said, the prices are falling pretty quick.
Mine’s a Samsung DLP; I know DLP doesn’t have as crisp a picture, but it was also the only choice for zero burn in and wide viewing angle.
I’m intrigued when you say you’re getting “true HD content” via digital cable. Do you simply mean widescreen? Or real HDTV? Because even that — at its best — is only half the resolution that Blu-ray offers.
“The O.C.” on Fox, for example, is broadcast in 720p on digital cable. Good looking, and officially “HD content,” sure, but a long way from 1080p! Probably looks pretty hot on your Samsung DLP, though.
Ironically, major sporting events like the US Open, which would look great at 720p, are often broadcast in 1080i on digital cable. Usually because of live global transmission issues. Again, that’s officially “HD content”, but it’s again a long, long way from 1080p.
Current generation DVDs, which look “good enough” to you, are only 480p at best, and often only 480i!
Blu-ray offers full, glorious, 1080p. And depending on which exact model of 50″ Samsung DLP you have, that’s a quality jump that you really should be able to notice. I must say, however, and I’m sure you know this, that while DLP offers great bang-for-buck, it isn’t super crisp, clean, bright, or in fact any of the things that will show true HD content at its best. Great value-for -money, though. Big picture — when compared to last-gen sets, anyway.
You must have noticed reading my previous post that 50 inches is right smack-bang in the middle of the range I referenced in my post. So, yeah, it probably looks “ok” — and that’s pretty much what you said.
Even if you’ve “only” got the 720p Samsung, it’s already “up-rezzing” standard DVD content. Noticeable at 40″. Very noticable at your 50″. Intolerable at 60″.
Well, Shan, in part you’re making my point.
Nobody (at least, a vanishingly small group of people) can SEE 1080p because the aren’t sets out there.
Heck, typical people don’t have ROOM for a TV bigger than 60″.
Nobody wants to rebuy all their DVDs if the picture is “good enough.”
Let’s not lose touch with ordinary folks here. I myself am the target market for all this: someone tech-savvy who knows what the difference between 1080i and 1080p are, can afford to buy a TV that costs several thousand dollars, and still stupidly buys DVDs. But I’m finding it a hard sell to myself, much less to my mom.
I only know one person who cares about this HD-DVD vs BluRay thing at all, and he is a total HDophile with his own blog about HD stuff and everything.
Everyone else I know—including the guys who own 50″ TVs and quality upscalers and so on—doesn’t care at all. DVDs already look pretty good on their setups. They don’t see any reason to buy thousands of dollars worth of new gear and/or start paying twice as much for their movies. And these are technology-lovers with all the gadgets. Its not just because the HDCP and other DRM. They just aren’t interested at all (and neither am I).
Which is why I honestly think both HD disc formats are going to be a complete flop. I also think the PS3 is going to do badly in the marketplace, being late to the game and way overpriced—but then again, Microsoft seems to be able to sell the XBox360 and I didn’t think that was going to do so well either. So maybe Sony will do better than I expect with the PS3. But I honestly expect Nintendo to walk away the clear winner in this coming round, because they are designing their product for the 90% market while Sony and Microsoft are fixated on the hardcore niches. And the 90% market *does not care* about hi-def movie discs. My guess is less than 10% care about that.
Sure, people want to watch football or hockey in hi-def on broadcast television, but they are already more than satisfied with the picture quality of DVDs.
Well, and the one other thing that Sony especially has forgotten: They moved a *hell* of a lot of PS2’s because you could buy a PS2 for less than a DVD player, and there were already a *lot* of DVD titles. Neither is true this time around.
Myself, I haven’t bought any HDTV yet, when I do it will probably be a 720p DLP system, around 50″. That’s the minimum to represent an improvement over the 36″ NTSC I already have, but it’s also the maximum I see any point in owning, and it’s finally coming under the $1K price point that represents my personal limit on what I’m prepared to pay for a TV. I’ve compared 1080i, 1080p, and 720p, although I can definitely see the difference between 1080i’s interlaced signal and the non-interlaced signals, the resolution difference is undetectable to me from 10+ feet away.
–Dave
You guys are saying “good enough” and “won’t see the difference” and “I’ve already just moved from 30+ standard to 50 current-gen”, and “price point”. And all those things are valid, as I’ve said.
But they are also all compromise positions.
Not seeing the difference is a function of the sets we’re all able to afford at current price points, not a function of the technology itself!
Having “just moved” from CRT to flatscreen, many people are hesitant to move again, but how long does that last? 2 years? 5 years? Certainly not more than that…
But, as I said in my original post, the relative quality at whatever price point suits you will only go up and we’re only saying “my apartment is too small for a big screen” because standard TV looks awful on anything bigger than 40″, and standard TV is still something we want to watch.
Think about the movies. You sit, like a good little audiophile, in the 8th row. Where does the screen go to? Yep, that’s right, to the edges of your vision. Are you telling me that if you could afford to do that at home, you wouldn’t?
The current generation of rules-of-thumb for distance from screen to size of screen is different than is was for CRT. It’s about maximizing the apparent resolution, not the actual one. It’s a quality call. With a huge, high-res, fast refresh, bright, excellent contrast screen, you can sit closer — provided of course you have the content to justify it.
Most of us would probably rather put a deposit on a house than buy a screen like that now at today’s prices, but again from my original post, those will soon be the screens we can all afford.
And we’re back to 1080p, and the only disc system capable of showing a good quantity of that is Blu-ray. Don’t know anyone who wants it, Raph? You will, and sooner than you think.
I will not switch to an LCD. I have a ViewSonic Graphics Series G90f 19" CRT. This is an excellent monitor for professional graphics work and gaming. CRTs display color more accurately and still respond far more quickly than LCDs. CRT monitors are actually the way to go in terms of quality, but LCDs lend themselves to other considerations such as less physical space required, lessened power expenditures, improved reading performance, and ocular health benefits.
That was very true three years ago, true last year, only just true this year …. and I’m sure you see where I’m going with that.
It’s like the old digital vs. film argument. Once you get past 15 “megapixels” (meh, hate marketing-tech-speak!) the argument is academic. But, when a good-enough, acceptable-price-point consumer camera runs about 8 megapixels — as they do right now — then it’s still technically “right” to prefer film.
That said, all three professional photographers I know personally have gone fully digital. But, as the man’s sig says, the plural of anecdote is not data! 🙂
Hmm, well, I’ve never heard of the 8th row rule either, and I bet most people haven’t.
I also only bought three TVs since I started buying my own (that’s upgrade TVs — leaving out one small one we got for another room). That makes it, let’s see… one every 5 years or so, as you said.
I’m not an incredibly early adopter for most things; I got a decent digital camera this year, HD TV last year, and it took us years to climb on the DVD bandwagon in the first place. But I’m still faster than most of the average folks I know.
So maybe I will be in the market for Blu-Ray in four years, is what this boils down to. I’m willing to concede that point. I think it still bolsters my point as well — right now, anyway, this isn’t something I think most people are looking for.
Raph wrote:
Everett M. Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations posits five adopter categories: a) innovators, b) early adopters, c) early majority, d) late majority, and e) laggards. The diffusion of an innovation is represented by a bell curve. Arguing that “the majority of consumers are not innovators or early adopters” is like arguing that water is liquid.
Just because a new technology isn’t yet mass-market doesn’t mean it is in the early adopter phase and destined to be ubiquitous. And here we have a technology that *must* be near-ubiquitous to be successful. Sometimes the technology serves a need people don’t have, or they have it but the technology isn’t superior enough to readily available alternatives to prevail.
That’s what we’re arguing about here: Are the improvements from 720p (upscaled DVD) to 1080i (HD-DVD) and/or 1080p (BluRay) significant enough to bring the mass market to commit themselves to another round of replacing their video library? DVD was clearly superior to VHS in a variety of ways that were immediately apparent to consumers and had *nothing* to do with video quality (no rewinding, rapid movement through the material, subtitles and alternative audio in several languages). The HD upgrades to that technology don’t have anything additional to offer *except* higher video quality, a selling point that is not an automatic clincher for the average buyer.
*Then* you have to ask yourself if the technical advantages of 1080p over 1080i are sufficient to overcome the fact that BluRay is yet another technically superior but proprietary Sony format, and those have a *long* history of failing and leaving their buyers stuck with orphan technology.
–Dave
“Standard” DVDs will be unwatchable by even ordinary folk on anything bigger than 150cms.
An interesting comment. I’ve watched many DVDs on a 106″ projector which, by my rough calculations, would be over a 250cm screen, without considering it unwatchable.
I think the situation is *worse* than Raph makes it out to be. I think the real reason that the HD cable signal looks “good” is not because it is HD, but because it isn’t interlaced. Looking at a standard HD vs Standard comparison in a store the other day, the only difference I could tell was in the static text that had the canonical interlace dance. If you put out the signal at 480p, I likely wouldn’t be able to tell a difference.
One shocking thing about watching movies on my iPod was that the subtitles were clearer to read than on my TV. 240p beats 480i any day of the week for static images.
If we are talking about movies, I think we are all forgetting that we are looking at *moving pictures*. The bandwidth of the eye is so vastly smaller than 1080p that the extra detail is utterly meaningless. If the movie is at all good, I will, minutes into it, stop realizing I’m looking at a screen at all. At this point, I can, and have, seen through static, people partly blocking ones vision, bad viewing angles, any number of problems.
HD video is a hard sell. If you want to know where my money would be, it would be in HDR (high dynamic range) displays. That is a side-by-side comparison that the average consumer can easily understand.
I’ve really enjoyed this discussion! On more round, if you’re up for it:
What is people’s personal feeling on the arrival date for enough home bandwidth to make this whole argument irrelevant — the way it sort-of is now for CDs and music?
In a previous career, I wrote a paper in 1996 that correctly picked 2000 as the year home bandwidth would start making song downloading relatively painless. Not that I am saying this was clever — far from it — I simply picked the midpoint of the ranges people were commonly throwing around at the time!
VOD via digital cable is already so convenient that I haven’t rented a movie in a couple of years. I don’t have time to watch all the movies I’d like to see, so every month there’s two or three that we miss the chance to see because we just never got around to them.
I am also in the habit of scanning the movie listings and setting up 3am recordings of movies. Then I catch up at my leisure — often on movies from ages ago that I never got around to.
If I could grab the latest VOD movies and save them that way, I’d be set, frankly. Effectively, there’s enough “bandwidth” in that sense right now.
But you’re really referencing a broader constellation of issues: peer to peer, piracy, cost, and so on. For a segment of the audience, movie downloads akin to Napster a few years ago is already here. BitTorrent is chock full of multigig downloads. It just takes leaving it overnight.
I don’t see end-user bandwidth for PCs increasing that dramatically in the short term — last mile issues, etc. So there’s an opportunity for folks like the cable companies to sneak in and establish their business models first.
Oh, and this is worth looking at. If a trusted brand like Amazon or Netflix started doing this sort of thing and the delays to get the movie were not too long, then I htink a lot of folks might jump on it.
Raph, and there’s this…
And this…
[…] Now, this excursion did have a point. Change happens, and usually faster than we quite know. We’re discussing some elements of that change in the thread on HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray, for example, and one thing that is clear is that not only is the tech changing faster than we quite know what to do with it, it’s also (as the science fiction has it) a poorly distributed future. But technical change is is many ways the easy one. Pop culture — and in this I include games as well as movies, music, books, and TV — is far more ephemeral, far more self-referential and demanding to follow, far faster in pace. […]