Is It Rant Tiem Nao?

[jetpack_monkey]

Don't ask me how, but I accidentally wandered into the Amazon.com forums on Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Man, that shit is hateful. Just a bunch a people with nothing better to do than post smackdown after poorly worded smackdown against the format they like least. They stalk the forums for both formats, too. Every poor newb who wanders into the HD-DVD forum looking for answers is met with "Don't use HD-DVD, it's for lamers." "Don't listen to that Sony shill. HD-DVD will win the format war because Blu-ray has xxxx bad thing that doesn't matter to Joe Consumer. HD-DVD has..." "What kind of idiot are you? Blu-ray has completely unrelated thing that may or may not be true."

What ever happened to having a preference? It's a freakin' movie player, people. It's not a political party. It's not determining the future of your country -- just the future of your living room. Read a fucking book, get some air, get a life. Were I about to buy a player, I think I'd be scared off of HD for a while in both formats with that kind of vitriol flying around.

Geez macreeze. Perspective!

Comments

[jetpack-monkey.livejournal.com]

I do remember that Dad appeared in a production of West Side Story that he had a tape of, but we could never watch said tape because it was Beta.

[qkellie.livejournal.com]

Beta vs. VHS was a big deal in my household when I was in pre-school. And the Wikiepedia article here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war) is actually fascinating.

Time was, you could go into a video store (not a Blockbuster, mind you, but usually something mom and pop called something pitiful like Video Hut) and there were about six different formats to differentiate. Movies were on VHS, Betamax, and several different DVD precursors. We briefly owned a CED player (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc), but we also adopted VHS pretty early on instead of Beta.

On a side note, we did use Beta and SVHS in video production classes I took as recently as 1997. In fact, we did all our video editing on a reconfigured Commodore 64 computer(!!).

I love antique technology. Bury me with an 8-track or something, seriously.

[jetpack-monkey.livejournal.com]

I have a record player, so I'm down with that.

Actually, Beta is still the preferred format for shot-on-physical-video productions (like PBS and low-budget cable reality series), since it does offer superior picture and sound. The article you linked is a good analysis of why it died as a home video product, however.

[qkellie.livejournal.com]

The article you linked is a good analysis of why it died as a home video product, however.

Yes, and why economists and marketing analysts are still scratching their heads over why the public overwhelmingly went with the format nobody thought they would! Heck, by that logic, we'll all have Blu-Ray units in the next five years! ;)

[jetpack-monkey.livejournal.com]

Which logic is that? *blink*

[qkellie.livejournal.com]

Oh, I just think of Blu-Ray as being the inferior format, but customers could prove me wrong. I don't even have an HD TV yet, so who'm I to judge?

[jetpack-monkey.livejournal.com]

In terms of pure capacity, Blu-ray outshines HD-DVD. In terms of quality, most tests have found the two to be comparable in terms of audio and video. There's a couple of reasons for this. First is that HD-DVD uses dual-layer discs while Blu-ray tends to use single-layer. Second is that they're starting to hit the point where human perception won't be able to discern a distinct difference in visual quality, so even if Blu-ray does move to double-layer discs and ups the level of detail, Joe Consumer will really only be able to register it as a statistic. From a sensory perspective, it might as well be the slightly-less detailed-but-who-can-tell HD-DVD.

HD-DVD has more titles out right now, almost entirely due to Universal's aggressive release schedule. Blu-ray has taken a blow in this area because 20th Century Fox refuses to release more high-def titles until the DRM and encryption protocols are 100% hacker-proof. Have fun waiting, guys. There's also some speculation that Blu-ray's two biggest supporters -- Sony and Disney -- are waiting for the holiday season to really blitz the market with titles, hoping to use the surge to definitively win the format war.

One weird issue that Blu-ray discs have is that the data is stored much closer to the discs surface than in HD-DVD or standard DVD, meaning a few scratches in the wrong places can be really devastating. A few manufacturers combat this issue by adding an anti-scratch coating.

[qkellie.livejournal.com]

Very interesting! It's hard to say which is "better," then. I wonder about a potential player that could handle both formats. Would that be possible?

[(Anonymous)]

Blu-ray has scratch-resistant surface..At least that's what i heard...

[jetpack-monkey.livejournal.com]

Depends on the disc manufacturer, from what I understand, but it may have been universally adopted at this point.

[jetpack-monkey.livejournal.com]

Possible, yes. LG has one out now that unfortunately can't handle some of the higher level functions of one of the two formats (I forget which). It costs 1200 dollars -- more than buying an HD-DVD and Blu-ray box separately.

Another one is coming out that will have full functionality for both, but again, the price is such that you might as well buy two dedicated boxes.