Let me start by saying that I’m choosing HD-DVD in the format wars. I want to be clear about that upfront, because I have mentioned it in previous posts. HD-DVD has the content that I want to see in Hi-Def on my TV – so that’s what I’m choosing.
Having said that – I don’t hate Blu-Ray, or want it to “lose” for any particular reason. I know there are some Sony/Blu-Ray fanboys out there that are never going to except that, since I’m about to say some negative things about Blu-Ray, but I honestly have no bias towards either format. If HD-DVD loses, I’ll get over it. My Xbox360 add-on drive will still work, it wasn’t that expensive, and the disks I bought will still play. No big deal.
However, if the state of Blu-Ray doesn’t improve – HD-DVD isn’t going anywhere.
Let’s look at some of the problems…
1 – Software problems with Blu-Ray 1.1 Players – Currently, Blu-Ray disk lack the interactivity features that HD-DVD already has. The development of BD-Java, the technology that will give this interactivity to Blu-Ray disks, is apparently having problems. There was a deadline set by the Blu-Ray Disk Association that said all Blu-Ray players manufactured after October 31st, 2007 must have BD-Java on board. Currently, only one BR 1.1 player has been announced, and it was set to come out in November – but now it has been delayed until 2008.
This is a serious problem for studios like Warner Bros, who have invested heavily in developing Blu-Ray versions of titles like The Matrix Trilogy that have the same features as their HD-DVD disk counterparts. Without this software upgrade, Warners can’t release these disks.
2 – player incompatibility issues – Another problem with this BD-J issue is compatibility with older players. The new features set on BD-J is NOT the current features set on the market. That means old discs may not work in the new players, and new discs may not work in old players.
Players that can be upgraded are going to need a software upgrade to work with BD-J – and an Ethernet port was not one of the requirements for Blu-Ray disk players – and most older players DON’T have them. That means disks will eitehr have to be downloaded and burned, mailed, or in some cases – the system might have to be returned to the manufacturer – just to upgrade the software to make new disks play.
Your average consumer isn’t going to like that at all. After all – this is supposed to be a movie player – not a computer.
3 – There are serious manufacturing problems with BD50 disks – Sony is apparently the only one capable of producing the larger capacity Blu-Ray disks with any kind of efficiency. It appears that non-Sony manufacturers are having such a problem with this that as much as 90% of a run of disks has to be discarded due to non-working disks.
So right now, many production houses that have been built to produce Blu-Ray disks are forced to only produce BR25 disks.
There is a lot more information you can read about here about the state of Blu-Ray. It’s not looking good. Admittedly, the site linked there is an obviously biased HD-DVD site – but their facts link to unbiased, non affiliated sites, so there is some validity to what is being said.
Since most of the blu ray players today are Playstation 3′s, it kind of makes the two first points a bit moot. The manufacturing problems, i guess arised from test runs of the 50gb discs. No way is a company with any business sense going to run those discs into production. Still though, with HD uptake not being that great at the moment, the Blu Ray camp still has plenty of time to get themselves sorted. Personally im going to go for Blu Ray, just due to the amount of things i can stick onto the disk. It also looks to be the one leading the HD format war at the moment. It also has a catchy name, always great for marketing :)
HD DVD has 51GB TL discs waiting in the wings, and they are supposed to be compatible with all existing players. Toshiba claims that no studio has requested such a large capacity disc yet, however – there is just no demand for it.
There is supposedly a 1.5x bitrate increase to go with it, which would match Blu-Ray.
Who knows if they would suffer the poor replication efficiency levels that plague Blu-Ray.
My self i have had no need for blueray or HD DVD yet, but that is because i don’t feel the need too watch my videos in high definition. I am interested in the large amount of data each of them can hold, this would be useful too me for backups, yet i don’t have a writer for either.
I also want to point out a new type of disk that might someday take the market, made by a startup called mempile, here’s an article talking about it.
http://blog.spocore.com/?p=25
The Blu-ray is not very much popular in india,nor is HDTV.Simply because of its high cost here!I agree with capturesteve that mempile can be a better option for holding large amount of data.Check out his article!
Well, i can confirm that Aussies love blu-ray and its not just me saying that. Here in AUS likes to have the best when it comes to Gadgets and so on.
[...] it was mentioned in our previous Blu-Ray Status article, all upcoming Blu-Ray players will now come with their own version of Java which will [...]
Much as seeing Sony go down for the second time in a format war would be amusing, I frankly don’t much care which format succeeds. I’m just waiting for one of them to emerge as the standard so we can get on with buying hardware while feeling confident that we haven’t picked the one which isn’t going to have long-term content support from the studios.
@iokara: It’s true that Australia likes to be an early adopter of technology. However the fact that Bluray is more prevalent in Aus has nothing to do with it being the ‘best’ format, and everything to do with our country’s vendors arbitrarily deciding to sell one format exclusively and not the other. In truth the format which succeeds globally will probably be the one with the largest and most astute marketing campaign behind it, not the one with the best features or back-end technology.