8mm Forum: HD DVD is dead

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Posted by Paul Adsett (Member # 25) on February 18, 2008, 02:53 PM:

A series of body blows to the HD DVD format can lead to no other conclusion that the format is now in terminal stage:

1. Warner Brothers have announced that they will issue HD exclusively to Blu Ray.

2. Wal Mart and Best Buy have announcedthat they will no longer be selling HD DVD hardware or software, only promoting Blu Ray.

3. Toshiba have announced that they are "Looking at the final stages of HD DVD" and that Paramount Studios and Universal will not be held to their committment to release exclusively to the HD DVD format.

4. NetFlix have announced that they will no longer rent HD DVD, thus joining Blockbuster in going exclusively Blu Ray.

Looks like the way is now clear, for better or worse, for Sony Blu Ray to become the international standard format for high definition DVD.

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on February 19, 2008, 11:01 AM:

Interesting.

Believe it or not, I may try to snatch a clearance priced HD DVD player when I head up to WalMart tommorrow, as I have heard that they play your regular DVD's at a higher quality level, than a regular DVD player, and when we get a HDTV, our old DVD's will look great.

I don't believe that regular DVD's will disappear anytime soon anyhow.

Posted by Graham Ritchie (Member # 559) on February 19, 2008, 12:46 PM:

Its a case of Beta and VHS all over again, at present the stores here are pushing HD-DVD with few Blu-Ray players for sale, I bet they are not saying to much about "Warners Bros" and future product. I think a lot of people are going to be stuck with "lemons", I will wait for Blu-Ray to come down in price which wont be long.

Graham.

Posted by Paul Adsett (Member # 25) on February 19, 2008, 04:05 PM:

It's over. Toshiba officially threw in the towel today:

http://www.cepro.com/article/toshiba_officially_drops_hd_dvd_to_end_shipments_in_march/

I totally agree with Osi's comment - standard DVD's are going too be around for a very long time. High definition DVD is still a niche market.

Posted by Robert Wales (Member # 502) on February 19, 2008, 06:17 PM:

Osi, keep in mind that DVD players that upconvert standard definition to pseudo high-definition signals will only do so over the HDMI connection, so if your current television does not have an HDMI connection you will not see any improvements until you upgrade to a new set. To the best of my knowledge, only high-definition sets from the last few years are likely to have an HDMI input ( short for High-Definiton Multimedia Interface as it allows transmission of both digital audio and picture over one cable )

Blu-Ray players will also upconvert in exactly the same fashion, so if you don't have a tv that can take advantage of the HDMI connection you might as well just wait until Blu-Ray players come down in price and get one player for everything when you upgrade your set.

Posted by Joerg Polzfusz (Member # 602) on February 21, 2008, 06:28 AM:

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Convert_Your_HD_DVDs_to_Blu-Ray
[Wink]

Posted by Rob Young. (Member # 131) on February 21, 2008, 06:30 AM:

Agree with that, Robert.

At least this awful VHS vs. BETA for a new generation is now over and I can get on with saving up for Blue-Ray!

I just hope that Blue-Ray actually survives amidst the competition of downloading, etc. Certainly Hi-Def on disc doesn't look like it is going to be the mass market that standard DVD has become. Maybe Blue-Ray will be more akin to what was Laserdisc in terms of market share.

One good thing is that with the arrival of better and cheaper Hi-Def TVs and projectors, together with upscaling becoming fairly standard on all new players, all of our standard discs are going to look better rather than become obsolete. Have to agree that I think there is a lot of life left in standard DVD.

Posted by Graham Ritchie (Member # 559) on February 21, 2008, 12:20 PM:

I would only give standard DVD another 10 years, people will be looking for quality for there big LCD or Plasma TV, there is a lot of money to be made by the film companys so a big push by them for Blu-Ray might not be far away.

Graham.

Posted by Andrew Wilson (Member # 538) on February 23, 2008, 12:24 PM:

This is an interesting post.I have both HD and BLU RAY,so i can make comments on this thorny issue.
So Tosh has thru in the towel;here we are in the 21 century and the
big companies cant agree on one HD format.
If the above posts are correct then this is the first time in over 20yrs that Sony has backed a winning format.
HD DVD is more stable in playng discs in both HD and DVD,than Blu Ray.
The studios like the idea of REG.CODE.Mr.Joe public hates this idea.
I like both formats,some great movies,not availble on one format is on the other.
The main reason for BLU-RAY winning this new format war is because of the backing of most of the major players in Hollywood.
I would say that std dvd will be around for another five years or so,just until the dust settles.Andy.

Posted by Andrew Wilson (Member # 538) on February 24, 2008, 06:41 AM:

Well Osi did you get your cut price HD player?.Andy.

Posted by Mark Todd (Member # 96) on February 24, 2008, 08:19 AM:

Its ironic this time Sony do win its with the less atractive option !!!!! OH well lets hope the chinese get in to the market and the discs get down to sensible prices soonish.
Personally I still find standard dvd wonderful and while the coffers are in crisis will stay there for now.
I think there will be good market for std dvd for 20 years as there so much simply won`t benifit from Blu-ray as we said before also public domain stuff and lesser titles are easy and cheap on dvd and people are putting stuff on to cheap dvd and dvd-r or +r would never see the light of day any other way and all for the good.
Best Mark.

Posted by David Park (Member # 123) on February 26, 2008, 05:55 AM:

Yes Mark on a normal TV you will be correct.
But presently people who get a replacement TV in the main buy a HD Ready TV will find when they start to recieve HD TV programmes in the near future, they will see hopefully it is better than normal DVDs and go for BlueRay.
( I do hope the word BlueRay is dropped and a name like HD DVD thought up.)

Posted by Adrian Simmonds (Member # 581) on February 26, 2008, 08:08 AM:

This is a page that I wrote for our up coming Film For The Collector mag - due out in March:

Is the Hi Definition format war finally over ??

This time last year the so called high definition format war between HD DVD and Blu ray Disc had become so entrenched that the buzz at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in the USA was around possible combo players and/or discs, like LG's “Super Multi Blue” and Warner Bros.' “Total HD” format.

People hoped for a manageable truce that would stop scaring consumers from choosing a side, which is of course exactly what it did do.

“It’s the old VHS / Betamax war all over again” people were saying, but actually it was worse than that, because as a collector, it meant that you had to buy both machines as only certain titles were available on each format, so manufactures and studios starting talking about some kind of ‘dual format’ device to kick start Hi Definition.

Neither combo players nor the dual-format discs really took off however. And 12 months later the predictions are not of which side will emerge the victor, but exactly how hard Blu ray backers are laughing all the way to the bank.

Convincing Warner Bros. in January to give up its stance as neutral partner to both, in favour of throwing all of its Hollywood heft behind Blu-ray was a major coup for the Sony-backed format.

Before the announcement from Warner Brothers (craftily 2 days before USA’s biggest consumer show) the figures from America showed that Blu Ray and HD players for the year were selling at 49% each, with the remainder being combination machines.
However the week after Warners announcement the results make incredible reading:

90% Blu Ray, 7% HD and 3% for combo players.
2 weeks later (up to Jan 19th) the results still look gloomy for HD supporters — 63% for Blu Ray and just 33% for HD, and this with Toshiba selling HD machines in the States for as little as $99.

Of all the major Hollywood studios, there are now only 2 — Paramount and Universal still backing HD exclusively, whilst all of the others—Disney (who now own Pixar), Warner Bros, Sony (Columbia Tristar, MGM United Artists) Pictures are all backing Blu ray. There is also a very strong rumour doing the rounds that Paramount have a ‘get out’ clause in their contract with HD—which only runs till the end of the year anyway, and it is also strongly rumoured that Paramount have asked Toshiba (the biggest manufacturer of HD machines) to supply them with the first quarters sales figures of HD machines, and it will then make a decision on which format to support.

Of course, this can only be good news for everyone.

After all, we only ever wanted one system didn’t we?

And we have some cracking deals on Sony Blu Ray players and Blu Ray discs (starting at just £9.99) —
call now for our latest prices.

Kind regards,
Adrian
(Derann)

Posted by Timothy Ramzyk (Member # 718) on February 28, 2008, 02:23 PM:

I was sad to see HD DVD go, I think it was better suited for mass adoption, but now that it's gone, I hope Blu-ray makes it, and we start seeing more vintage titles releases to it. When projected , my hi-def disks definitely put my SD DVD to shame.

Robbin Hood was as close as I ever got to seeing an decendt approximation of three-strip 35mm TECHNICOLOR on my home screen.

Posted by Bill Brandenstein (Member # 892) on February 29, 2008, 11:57 AM:

Sony has introduced many proprietary formats over the years... (anybody here using a digital Hi-8 camcorder? Or have SACDs?) ...so they were bound to win one of these pointless wars sooner or later.

The real war has yet to be won: convincing the consumer to spend unbelievable amounts of money for better picture and sound, whereas most of them simply want another yukky-compressed download for their iPod.

DVD-Audio and SACD are essentially irrelevant because the consumer doesn't care. So is surround-sound as an audio format, even though it can be a spectacular experience. Blu-Ray supercedes all of these audio technologies in addition to video, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on February 29, 2008, 12:32 PM:

Andrew ...

No, they had already gotten rid of them in my local Wal-mart, but i have come up with a better alternative!

I was at Sears the other day, and they had a specific DVD player which is called an "Up-converter DVD player", which takes your standard DVD and raises it from 500 lines of resolution to the 1080 that your HDTV's run at, and for only 49.95! Damn good deal!

Posted by Paul Adsett (Member # 25) on February 29, 2008, 05:10 PM:

Osi,
I have the feeling that upcoverting DVD players are a lot of sales hype. I purchased a Sony upconverting player and I can see no difference in the picture quality at all. In any case, how can you possibly create more picture information than is on the standard definition DVD?

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on February 29, 2008, 10:30 PM:

Very good point Paul ...

What I plan on doing is having the Sears sales person hook up seperately, the regular DVD player to the HDTV first; observe the picture carefully ...

... and then,

Hook up the DVD upconverter player to the same HDTV, and see the difference in picture, if there will be a difference.

Even in standard DVD players, I have noticed a difference in DVD quality in playback. Within a year of DVD first being out, I bought a Phillips/Magnovox DVD player, (for 399.00), when there was only a couple hundred DVD's out there to buy, (my first video? "Bean: The Movie").

To this day, that first DVD player still works quite well, but is a little tired these days, so I bought a Coby DVD player
(brand new ... 24.00) and the picture is visibly better in quality.

Posted by David Park (Member # 123) on March 01, 2008, 03:19 AM:

My Pioneer upscalling DVD player into my Panasonic Projector definately gives me an improvement.

Posted by Claus Harding (Member # 702) on March 01, 2008, 11:22 AM:

Just my opinion, but personally, the one time I have seen an improvement in 'regular' DVDs has been when there is, in fact, more data on the disc.

The "Superbit" discs jettisoned all the extras in favor of more room for the film, thus lowering compression ratios and giving a better picture.
I have 'Das Boot' both as a Superbit 'Director's Cut' and as the full-length TV series on regular DVD, and even on a regular TV, you can see the improvement. Much like with film, on DVD, the laws of physics don't lie.... [Wink]

Best,
Claus.

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